FBI Cyber Chief: We’re Losing the Hacker War (VIDEO)

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Cyber criminals are everywhere. They lurk behind automated spamming programs, waiting for a clueless user to fall into the many traps that they have set. Facebook is one of the most targeted domains on the Internet, with the likes of the Facebook Fake Rollercoaster Accident scam and the "Do You Remember this Photo?" scam.

These are facts that FBI's cyber chief is all too aware of, as he has just recently declared that the United States is on the losing end of the war against these hackers.

It seems like FBI executive Shawn Henry is throwing in the towel when it comes to fending off these attacks and catching the culprits behind them. Henry is preparing to exit the organization where he has worked for over twenty years. But before leaving, he concludes that the U.S. is "not winning" these cyber wars.

I don’t see how we ever come out of this without changes in technology or changes in behavior, because with the status quo, it’s an unsustainable model. Unsustainable in that you never get ahead, never become secure, never have a reasonable expectation of privacy or security.

-- Shawn Henry, FBI executive assistant director

Henry explained that agents frequently come across data that has been stolen from corporations and executives who remain clueless that their databases have been compromised.

We have found their data in the middle of other investigations. They are shocked and, in many cases, they’ve been breached for many months, in some cases years, which means that an adversary had full visibility into everything occurring on that network, potentially.

-- Shawn Henry, FBI executive assistant director

The reason why the FBI can't catch up to these hackers isn't because they can't match the intelligence of the latter. Like every war, it's all in the numbers--or rather, the lack of it. There are too many hackers in the world and too many points of entry that the FBI can't move fast enough to monitor all of the holes and vulnerabilities in time.

Article by Hazel Chua
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