CLEVELAND - Perhaps the biggest challenge that cyber crime poses to the FBI is how to convey just how much of a threat it is to the United States and you.
“It’s your info they’re coming after,” warned Joe Demarest, Assistant Director to the FBI’s Cyber Crime Division, on a recent visit to Northeast Ohio to meet with the Cleveland field office and address the City Club about these concerns.
Cyber threats have shot to the top of the FBI's concerns because they involve everything regarding money and technology.
As are all of the FBI’s field offices, the Cleveland FBI is working to prevent the devastating losses that cyber crime can have on business in Northeast Ohio.
In recent years, the FBI established a cyber task force at each of its 56 field offices, manned by about 1,200 people.
On April 25, news surfaced that Russian hackers breached White House computers and obtained sensitive information, including President Obama’s unclassified email.
While that is a stunning headline, cyber crime still comes off as a distant, abstract concept to average people – at least, until their identity gets stolen.
Demarest said cyber threats generally fall into five different categories.
NATION STATES
Much like the aforementioned Russian hacking, the FBI’s next area of cyber concern is foreign countries trying to steal our industrial information or military secrets.
“Nation states – the most prolific army working against us,” Demarest said.
One of the most notable recent cases was North Korea hacking Sony Pictures over the controversial comedy “The Interview” in December.
Within hours of the attack on Sony, Demarest said the FBI had teams on the ground at Sony offices, going from computer to computer.
Thousands of emails from Sony employees were exposed, causing some people to lose their jobs while the financial damage to Sony ran into the millions of dollars.
No two nation states are alike in regards to the threat they pose to the U.S.
Demarest said China remains the biggest threat; Asian actors tend to infiltrate the U.S. health care industry.
While Russia poses a threat, Demarest said its abilities are not as good as ours – although its know-how can sometimes be traced back here.
“There are [people with] PhDs working against us on the other side of the world. Many are trained here in the U.S.,” he said.
Although the U.S. is currently working on a nuclear deal with Iran, the country remains a threat in the Middle East.
After initial takedown, more efforts put into making new fake accounts look genuine.
Virus Bulletin's research into a scam selling fake Twitter accounts being passed off as 'followers' has helped in the takedown of more than 45,000 such accounts - but has also showed that the scammers are upping their game.
The success of a social media account can be measured by the number of followers it attracts. It seems obvious that this doesn't work the other way: an account won't become more successful if it simply buys a bunch of followers. Yet the shady corners of the Internet are rife with sites that let you 'boost your reputation' by buying followers.
Facebook posts like this!
Not a day goes by that I don’t login to see one of these posts. And they always seem to have a bazillion (no exaggeration) likes, comments or shares.
Nearly 5000 people saw this (image on the left) in their newsfeed and figured clicking, commenting and then sharing would reveal some crazy feature or event.
And guess what did happen! Nothing at all.
These posts infuriate me.
And it’s not just the fact they are filling up my already overpopulated newsfeed with rubbish and distracting me from the stuff I actually wanna see, like my friends sharing their thoughts on TV shows, photos of food or jokes they’ve stolen from Reddit. It’s the unashamed use of terrible circumstances like cancer, or sick kids or horrific accidents that these pages usually use to get clicks that really pisses me off.
