Last week, I spoke to Joe Stewart, a senior security researcher at Atlanta based SecureWorks who probably has done more than any other researcher to make life more difficult and expensive for cyber crooks.

Stewart is speaking at the RSA Security conference in San Francisco on Thursday about what he thinks can be done to institutionalize some of these efforts.

Stewart says the world needs a more concerted effort to identify -- if not apprehend -- top cyber criminal actors. He also said that ISPs need to be held more accountable when they ignore overt signs of persistent criminal activity on their networks.

What follows are some excerpts from our discussion.