U.S. Hopes To Unplug Cybercrime In N.Va.

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.washtech.com/news/regulation/14657-1.html

By Brooke A. Masters,
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 15, 2002; 7:07 AM

The FBI and U.S. attorney's office in Alexandria are launching efforts
to fight cybercrime, hoping to head off potential terrorism and
prosecute criminal attacks on Northern Virginia's Internet economy.

Six prosecutors will work full time on computer crime, including
software piracy, economic espionage, online child pornography and
terrorist efforts to disrupt the electronic systems of banks,
utilities and other institutions, U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty
announced yesterday.

Four of the positions are new, part of a national effort to add 50 to
60 federal cybercrime prosecutors to 10 key offices across the
country.

At the same time, Van Harp, assistant director in charge of the FBI's
Washington field office, announced that he has created a cybercrime
task force to bring together prosecutors, state, local and federal law
enforcement officers, the Defense Department and industry.

Cybercrime has been a growing problem across the country, particularly
in high-tech centers such as Northern Virginia. Various government
agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission, the FBI and the
Securities and Exchange Commission, have jumped on the issue, and the
three U.S. attorney's offices in the region have had prosecutors
working on the problem.

Federal officials in Maryland and the District said they devote a few
prosecutors to cybercrime.

But the coordinated efforts announced yesterday represent a growing
maturity in the federal fight against online crime and a growing
awareness that the nation's technology infrastructure could be
vulnerable to a disabling attack.

"It's not just a criminal problem," Harp said. "We see it as a problem
in terrorism, and it threatens the critical infrastructure of this
country." He said federal agencies, utilities and financial
institutions are being targeted – or "pinged" – daily by would-be
hackers. "If they are successful, it could cause some damage."

McNulty said his office wants to make sure that businesses feel
comfortable coming forward and admitting that they have been attacked,
a problem that has hampered law enforcement efforts in the past.

The new groups may help elevate the importance of cybercrime at a time
when companies sometimes have had trouble getting law enforcement to
pay attention, said Peter Tippet, founder of TruSecure Corp., a
computer security company. "It's been really hard since [the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks]," he said. "The law enforcement machinery is
clogged up with 9-11 stuff . . . and the threshold is much higher than
it was in early September."

Both the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office have worked in this area
before. The Washington field office, which covers the District and
Northern Virginia, has the National Infrastructure Protection Center
to track hackers. The new task force will bring together more than 25
agents from that squad and a second that also has been focused on
high-tech crime, Harp said.

The new head of the prosecution unit, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jack
Hanly, handled the 1999 case of Eric Burns, a teenage hacker convicted
of breaking into dozens of Web sites across the country in a bizarre
effort to impress a high school classmate.

Burns, who used the screen name "Zyklon," scrawled messages such as
"Crystal I love you" across seemingly secure sites, including some
used by the U.S. Information Agency and then-Vice President Al Gore.

This month, authorities say, the FBI and U.S. attorney's office worked
with their counterparts in Pittsburgh to rescue a 13-year-old girl who
disappeared from her Pennsylvania home and was found several days
later chained to a bed in the Herndon home of a man she met on the
Internet.



-
ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org

To unsubscribe email majordomo () attrition org with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY
of the mail.