CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. \u2014 To thwart increasingly dangerous cybercriminals, law enforcement agents are working to \u201cburn down their infrastructure\u201d and take out the tools that allow them carry out their devastating attacks, FBI Director Christopher Wray said March 4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unsophisticated cybercriminals now have the power to paralyze entire hospitals, businesses and police departments, Wray said during a conference on cybersecurity at Boston College. The ever-changing threat has forced law enforcement to get creative and target the dark web sites and other tools at hackers\u2019 disposal, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe reality is we are long past the days where we can fight this threat just one by one, one bad guy at a time … one victim company at a time. We\u2019ve got to figure out ways to tackle the cyberthreat as a whole,\u201d Wray told the crowd of FBI agents, university officials and others on the Chestnut Hill campus Wednesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The U.S. saw a nearly 40 percent increase in ransomware attacks between 2018 and 2019, said Joseph Bonavolonta, the head of the FBI\u2019s office in Boston. There was an even more dramatic uptick in such attacks in just the four states \u2014 Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island and New Hampshire \u2014 that the Boston office covers, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe threat of ransomware is continuing to grow and evolve and we are seeing a shift to more sophisticated, smaller-scale ransomware campaigns, which maximizes the impact on the victims to extort higher ransoms,\u201d Bonavolonta told the conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Foreign actors, especially those from China, are also using cyber attacks to steal research from the defense contractors and other companies to \u201cavoid the hard slog of innovation,\u201d Wray said, adding that the thieves are then turning around and using that information to compete against the very companies they ripped off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn effect, they are cheating twice over,\u201d Wray said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wray stressed the importance of indicting cybercriminals, even when they are outside the grasp of U.S. law enforcement in places like Russia, China or Iran, saying such criminals must be held accountable \u201cno matter where they are.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those countries \u201caren\u2019t the tourism destinations they used to be and one day they will slip up and when they do, we are there. Because the FBI has a broad reach and an even broader memory,\u201d Wray said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers was among other speakers expected at the conference, which was organized by the FBI and the Masters in Cybersecurity Policy and Governance Program at Boston College\u2019s Woods College of Advancing Studies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The ever-changing threat has forced law enforcement to get creative and target the dark web sites and other tools at hackers\u2019 disposal, FBI Director Christopher Wray said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":62099,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":10,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":{"8":{"categories":["doj-fbi","federal-oversight","home","daily-brief","newsletters","it-cloud-report"],"primary_category":"doj-fbi"}}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"coauthors":[7149],"class_list":["post-20474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cyber"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"FCWQ2ZAJMNHP5IITUTB2XR2VJU","arc_canonical_url":"\/civilian\/fbi-doj\/2020\/03\/04\/fbi-working-to-burn-down-cybercriminals-infrastructure\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n