How Many FBI Agents Does It Take to Plant a Bug?
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The bureau needs 11 agents, some engineers and three days to get the job done.  And the intrepid information gatherers say they need a hefty budget increase to keep up with terrorists.
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The FBI is looking for suspects in a scam that uses bomb threats to extort money from banks and stores, officials told CNN. For the past week, banks and stores in 12 states have been hit by the scam, in which a caller claims there is a bomb that can be detonated if workers don't wire money to a specific account.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into a spate of bomb threats phoned in to businesses that resulted in employeesâ wiring thousands of dollars overseas.
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Five years after the anthrax attacks that killed five people, the FBI is now convinced that the lethal powder sent to the Senate was simply made and contained nothing that conclusively links the case to any specific source, widening the pool of possible suspects in a frustratingly slow...
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By John Shultz, The Kansas City Star, Mo.  Jun. 27--It caused enough concern -- an apparently leaking package, a return address in Africa and a rash -- to bring in the FBI, a hazardous-materials response team and the bomb squad.   In the end, it was largely benign.
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ANCHORAGE, Alaska  - FBI agents combed the offices   of six Alaska state lawmakers on Thursday as part of a criminal   investigation, according to local news reports and lawmakers   not targeted in the probe.
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Charges could come as early as next week after a covert operation lasting more than a year. WASHINGTON -- The FBI has spent more than a year covertly investigating, including with the use of electronic surveillance
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(InfoWorld) - U.S. Internet users should expect a growing number of prosecutions for sending spam and related activities, such as creating botnets, officials with two U.S. law enforcement organizations said Thursday. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has 70 active investigations into spam-related crimes, said FBI special agent J. Keith Mularski, speaking at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's spam summit. The FBI has worked with the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA), a partnership between law enforcement agencies, universities, and private businesses, to identity spammers, he said. The NCFTA, launched in 2002, has identified more than 100 "significant spammers," including five tied to traditional organized crime, Mularski said. Partnerships with industry are important to fight cybercrime, Mularski said. The Internet Crime Complaint Center, a joint operation of the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, gets more than 22,000 complaints about cybercrime each month, up from 18,000 complaints a month last year, he said. "If we don't address it together, it's only going to get worse," he said. "Industry has all the information, because these guys are hitting their networks." The U.S. Department of Justice is targeting several spam-related activities, added Mona Sedky Spivack, a trial attorney in the DOJ Criminal Division's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. In June, theÂ DOJ and FBI launchedÂ Operation Bot Roast, targeting criminals who use networks of compromised computers, often called botnets, to send spam and launch distributed denial-of-service attacks. In addition to targeting "bot herders," criminals who control botnets, the DOJ will begin targeting "bot brokers," the people who negotiate the sale of botnet resources, she said. "We're going to start pegging them with some criminal liability," she said. "There is a lot of money getting exchanged here." Botnets and anonymous proxies are popular with spammers right now because they don't have to use their own computer resources to send the e-mail messages, Spivack said. This makes it more difficult for law enforcement agencies to track down spammers. The DOJ and other federal agencies are also targeting stock-scheme spam campaigns, she said. In a typical "pump and dump" stock scheme, spammers buy cheap stocks, then send out huge volumes of spam telling recipients that the stock price is poised to rise. The stock price goes up because of the spam campaign, and the spammers sell their stock at a large profit. On Tuesday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange CommissionÂ filed securities fraud chargesÂ against two Texas men for an alleged pump and dump scheme. The scheme allegedly cost investors $4.6 million. Despite news reports of such schemes, they tend to work, Spivack said. "It appeals to unsophisticated investors who are day traders at home," she said. The U.S. Congress passed the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act in 2003, and there's still debate over whether the law has reduced the amount of spam U.S. Internet users receive. CAN-SPAM allows senders to deliver unsolicited commercial e-mail, but requires that they stop when a recipient asks them to. CAN-SPAM also requires that commercial e-mail have accurate header information, have a legitimate postal address for the sender and have a working opt-out mechanism. The law has given some spammers a set of rules they must follow to become legitimate marketers, said Aaron Kornblum, a senior attorney with Microsoft. But law breakers have become inventive as law enforcement and private companies find new ways to combat spam, he added. Some spammers rotate the URLs (uniform resource locators) in their spam, making it difficult to track, others don't include URLs at all, he said. Some used pixelated text to defeat spam filters. "We need our investigative techniques to evolve," he said.
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Blog: How many scientists does it take to turn on a lightbulb?
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An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignite...
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The FBI is investigating whether a mid-level Pentagon official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Larry Franklin, passed classified material regarding internal policy deliberations on Iran to two staffers at the American Israel Public Affairs
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ANSONIA, Conn. - They were looking for drugs, but also found bugs...
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Oregon researchers have started work on a new five-year, &#36;10.3 million biodefense contract to find the proteins associated with bacteria that cause salmonella poisoning and typhoid fever, and the virus that causes monkeypox.
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The buzzing. The biting. You&#39;d think there were already enough insects in the world to drive you buggy. However, a team of researchers at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia announced yesterday that
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An official with the Homeland Security Department&#39;s National Cyber Security Division said the 120-person office has been able to limit the harmful effects of at least one virus and has helped to track down online criminals in 28 countries.
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The Florida Department of Law Enforcement sent its most aggressive agent to work on the case full time, armed with big stacks of files from the FBI and sheriff's investigators. Even with those resources, it took nearly two years to finally solve the 1951 murders of black civil rights activists Harry T. and Harriette Moore, whose house was bombed by Ku Klux Klan members.
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HALIFAX (CP) - The buzzing. The biting. You&#39;d think there were already enough insects in the world to drive you buggy. However, a team of researchers at Dalhousie University in Halifax announced Tuesday that