Last Friday, the FBI announced that they have put in place an initiative to uncover and investigate web-based intrusion attacks using a crew of specially trained computer scientists who are able to extract hackers’ digital signatures from the mountains of malicious code they have released on the world. The Next Generation Cyber Initiative’s key aim is to expand their ability to quickly define “the attribution piece” of a cyber-attack so they can quickly jump on the black hat hackers.
“The attribution piece is: who is conducting the attack or the exploitation and what is their motive. In order to get to that, we’ve got to do all the necessary analysis to determine who is at the other end of the keyboard perpetrating these actions.”
The Cyber Division’s main focus is cyber intrusions.
“We are obviously concerned with terrorists using the Internet to conduct these types of attacks,” McFeely said. “As the lead domestic intelligence agency within the United States, it’s our job to make sure that businesses’ and the nation’s secrets don’t fall into the hands of adversaries.”
Word of the FBI’s new initiative comes on the heels of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s strong call for action earlier this month, when he said that cybersecurity is at a “pre-9/11 moment.” The FBI will share the information it gathers with the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and the National Security Agency. Earlier this month the military announced similar efforts to counter cyber attacks directed at the U.S.
The Obama administration, hoping to circumvent a stalled Congress, is finalizing its draft executive cybersecurity order. The Associated Press, which received a copy of it last week, said the order “would put the Department of Homeland Security in charge of organizing an information-sharing network that rapidly distributes sanitized summaries of top-secret intelligence reports about known cyberthreats that identify a specific target.”
