To Catch a Cyber Thief: What the FBI is Doing to Shut Down Cybercrime Rings
When it comes to fighting cyber crime, the bad guys are more technologically advanced, but the good guys are catching up. In a recent ZDNet blog post, J. Keith Mularski, a special agent who works in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Cyber Division discusses the steps that they took in bringing down DarkMarket, which was a notorious crime forum for hackers and cyber criminals.
The key to success, according to the special agent, is transnational police cooperation where law enforcement from many countries works together to bring these bad guys down. But, it is still a game of luck. Check out this paragraph from the article:
“Shutting them down is a matter of luck and perseverance and security experts liken the effort to a game of Whac-a-Mole, where underground forums easily emerge to serve as clearing houses or virtual supermarkets for myriad criminal activities over the Internet.”
Kudos to ZDNet for getting access to the FBI and giving us this glimpse into what is being done to address the global cybercrime issue. However, we get the strong sense that it’s all about luck and the bad guys will always be one-step ahead. The U.S. has developed the most advanced security technologies and policies. So, why does it come down to luck and partnering with other nations to win this battle? Welcome all thoughts and comments.
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In my mind, I think that in order to combat cyber crime, the US (or the world for that matter) would need to employ clandestine tactics. which are quite familiar with the intelligence community. Instead for waiting for mole to pop up, we need to infiltrate the hacker community to retrieve up-to date crimes. It seems that we would need to use the same unethical cyber behavior that the criminals are using in order to get ahead. I guess I am saying is that we need to hack the hackers. We need to think like criminals in order to fight the criminals.
Whack-a-mole analogy seems apt here. The lure of easy, hard-to-trace, illicit riches will continue to attract some of the most brilliant but devious minds out there and getting ahead of these criminal rings will require some serious out of the box methods. What about flooding these networks with misinformation? If you can create an environment where no one can trust anyone within the network, then maybe you can staunch the activity altogether.