Agape Blog

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has raised concerns over the growing cyber crimes in US that cost tens of millions of dollars and also posing as a serious threat to US security. The FBI cyber division pointed out activities like computer spying and personal information theft as something that needs immediate measures to be curbed.

The U.S. intelligence agencies have earlier pointed fingers on Russia and China as being the two nations that have the abilities to electronic spying by breaking through U.S. computer networks. Apart from these, FBI has narrowed down 24 more countries that pose a threat to the US. Without naming the 24 countries,FBI has made this statement: “There are countries who have an interest in obtaining information from the U.S., in terms of the electronic theft of data.”

The US computer networks are being constantly attacted by Botnets by sending spam e-mails and spreading malicious code. Thus the U.S. federal agents are stepping up efforts to fight computer crime. They are also joining hands with some foreign counterparts to deal this serious issue. It is worth noting that in January this year, U.S. President George Bush had launched an effort called the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, to address the issue of comouter crimes.

With the number of hackers and fraudsters increasing and posing a threat for online users, FBI took the responsibility to punish them. And how they did it was by collecting information about hackers, a method that is often used by the hackers themselves to spoof information from genuine users.

The FBI launched a forum www.darkmarket.ws that captured the details of thousands of hackers and spammers online. Many ID thieves and hackers had been using DarkMarket as a forum to share details of victims and tips, however the whole forum was secretly run by a federal cybercrime agent for two years. J. Keith Mularski was the FBI agent who was managing the forum. He is a senior cybercrime agent based at the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance in Pittsburgh. The forum has been voluntarily closed earlier this month after running for just under two years, the reason given was that the forum was ‘attracting too much information’.

This forum was uncovered by the German radio station Südwestrundfunk. It indicated that FBI used DarkMarket to build ‘intelligence briefs’ on its members, complete with their internet IP addresses and details of their activities on the site.

Security companies understand the importance of applying brakes to the increasing activities of spammers. Hence it has been managing various activities like the one carried out by FBI. Also in 2004, the Secret Service ran a similar scheme on the crime board ShadowCrew.

Tips + Case Study + Valuable Information @ computer forensics. That’s what the links for today are all about.

1. Ray Weikal feels criminals are increasingly using the P2P and FTP file sharing protocols for executing their tasks. He discusses the road to cyber safety. Read more

2. Why is FBI stumped after recovering a secret audiotape? Read more

3. Technology is changing and so are the crimes related to it. This increases the need for the computer forensic experts, but what are their responsibilities? Read more

I was researching on cyber security and i came up with an article wherein the the famous American journalist - Brian Krebs interviewed FBI’s cyber division head - James Finch. I found it helpful as it provides insight into how the FBI sees cyber crime and hence thought of sharing the same.

Here’s the link to the article:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/08/qa_with_fbis_cyber_crime_chief.html?hpid=sec-tech

THE US government has been providing training to South African state officials in computer forensics to increase SA’s capacity to fight cyber crime, credit card frauds, intellectual property (IP) and counterfeit crimes. The training is carried out by the US justice department, which also trains Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents. Its the first time that US department has trained individuals outside their country.

Lot of cyber crimes and related activities have hit the African continent badly. Especially countries like Nigeria contribute the largest percentage of cyber crimes in the world. Also many sectors like pharmaceutical, automotive parts, aircraft parts and consumer goods, such as clothing, eyewear and handbags have been vulnerable to attacks in recent times.

For the benefit of traders who lose more than $2bn due to cyber frauds, South African department approached their US counterparts to assist it with the training, aimed at honing the forensic and analytical skills of customs officials working for the South African Revenue Service , the police, the national prosecuting authority and officials working in the trade and industry department’s IP enforcement division.

So far 400 officials have been trained and it has helped in cutting down the trade in pirated movies by 90% in SA. They are now planning to train their officials in digital forensics as well.