FBI Expands Cybercrime Division

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.informationweek.com/government/security/fbi-expands-cybercrime-division/240012560

By J. Nicholas Hoover
InformationWeek
October 30, 2012

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is adding resources, building new 
tools, increasing hiring and expanding collaboration with local groups 
as part of its Next Generation Cyber Initiative, an effort to overhaul 
the FBI's Cyber Division, the agency announced last week.

The FBI has long been a force in combating cybercrime. In the last year 
alone, the agency has busted dozens involved in the online trafficking 
of credit card and bank account data, arrested key members of the 
Anonymous and LulzSec hacktivist groups, broken up a sophisticated gang 
of online bank fraudsters, taken down a small-town mayor for hacking a 
website calling for his recall and worked closely with international 
officials to disrupt a botnet that had stolen $14 million.

However, the FBI still wants to get better, especially in its ability to 
attribute attacks to the hackers behind them. Attribution of cybercrime 
has long been the bane of law enforcement due to the nature of the 
Internet and the ability of hackers to spoof their IP addresses and rely 
heavily on proxies. As the adage says, on the Internet, nobody knows 
you're a dog.

Over the course of the last year, the law enforcement agency has 
launched an effort to "uncover and investigate Web-based intrusion 
attacks and develop a cadre of specially trained computer scientists 
able to extract hackers' digital signatures from mountains of malicious 
code," the FBI said in a press release. For example, the FBI has 
increasingly hired computer scientists to work alongside agents as part 
of cyber investigations.

[...]


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