Have cyber gangs become the modern-day Mafia? With billions of dollars in play, hackers and other cyber crooks are turning into career criminals, a transformation marked by an increasing professionalization and specialization among their ranks, according to a senior official at the FBI.
At the FOSE government IT show, Deputy Assistant FBI Director Steven Chabinsky outlined the anatomy of these emerging cyber crime syndicates, and detailed the efforts of law enforcement to profile and infiltrate their operations. eSecurity Planet has the story.
WASHINGTON — As cyber crime increasingly becomes the vocation of highly organized criminal syndicates, law enforcement authorities have been revamping their approach to address the growing sophistication of the threat.
Speaking here at the FOSE government IT show, Deputy Assistant FBI Director Steven Chabinsky said that high-tech crimes have become the bureau’s top law-enforcement priority, reflecting the heightened concerns about cybersecurity across the senior ranks of the federal government.
“If we fail to act, the cyber threat can be an existential threat, meaning it can challenge our country’s very existence, or significantly alter our nation’s potential,” Chabinsky said. “I am convinced that given enough time, motivation and funding, a determined adversary will always — always — be able to penetrate a targeted system.”
Through a series of sting operations, the FBI has been probing the anatomy of cyber crime gangs, which Chabinsky said have taken on a Mafia-like structure that is a far cry from the early days of the lone-wolf hacker setting out to make a name for himself.
