RSA: Law enforcement cybercrime successes
The FBI has made cybercrime one of its top three priorities, and currently has full time cyber officers deployed in 60 countries, Shawn Henry, assistant director for the agency's Cyber Division, said Thursday at the RSA conference.“Through those efforts we have arrested almost 100 people, recovered millions of dollars,” Henry said. “There's been tremendous success; we want to deploy agents in more countries, too.
But at the same time, fighting cybercrime has gotten harder. There was a 500 percent increase in malware from 2007 to 2008, Dave DeWalt, president and CEO of McAfee said at the RSA Conference. In addition, in 2008, Symantec detected 1.7 million new malicious code threats -- three times more than the amount found in 2007, and 12 times more than 2006, said Robert Holleyman, president and CEO of Business Software Alliance, who moderated the session.
And this isn't the 17 year-old hacker sitting in his basement looking for notoriety. These threats are coming from terrorist organizations and organized criminal groups with large financial backing, experts said.
Besides collaborating with foreign law enforcement, the FBI partners with other government agencies -- including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense -- to fight cybercrime, Henry said.
In addition, the FBI also relies on partnerships with the public sector to mitigate these threats, but more collaboration and sharing of intelligence is needed, Henry said.
