FBI Urged to Scrap &#36;170M Computer Project
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Lawmakers criticized FBI Director Robert Mueller on Thursday for continued problems with a costly computer project that was supposed to dramatically improve management of terrorism and other criminal cases.
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FBI officials said they have netted close to $87 million worth of counterfeit software and components in California, Washington and Texas as a result of a sting operation called Operation Digital Marauder.
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Fed-up lawmakers on a House oversight committee said Tuesday they want to strip a federal nuclear agency of its security responsibilities and threatened to shut down Los Alamos National Laboratory to correct a decade of security lapses there.
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The FBI has squandered $170 million  on a failed computer system agents can use to instantly share  information, and seems to know neither how long it will take  nor how much it will cost to build one, a Justice Department  audit showed on Thursday.
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The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion project to build the world's largest computer database of biometrics to give the government more ways to identify people at home and abroad, the Washington Post reported on Friday.
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The FBI and U.S. attorney's office are investigating the apparent theft of about &#36;350,000 in checks from a Democratic campaign committee, federal law enforcement and Democratic Party officials said Thursday.
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The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion  project to build the world's largest computer database of  biometrics to give the government more ways to identify people  at home and abroad, the Washington Post reported on Friday.
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Researchers looking to root out computer attacks hope that speed kills.
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Come on over for a little Bot Roast Federal law enforcement agents targeting botnets recently recorded a grim milestone, identifying the millionth potential zombie victim, the FBI said Wednesday.â¦
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By ROBBIE DINWOODIE CHIEF SCOTTISH POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT  A GBP14M computerisation project completed by Scottish Enterprise last year is to be scrapped in favour of a new system costing GBP7m, prompting an MSP to demand an investigation by ministers.
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(InfoWorld) - Officials with the FBI claim that global law enforcement partnerships are playing a significant role in its ongoing efforts to stomp out botnets and other computer-borne crimes. Security researchers have long maintained that one of the most significant obstacles to shutting down botnets is the distributed global nature of the individuals responsible for operating the networks of zombie PCs. Botnets are banks of computers infected by virus programs that allow them to be secretly used to carry out many forms of electronic attacks. The conventional wisdom has been that U.S. law enforcement officials have struggled to find the budget and manpower necessary to track down cyber-criminals operating on their own turf, let alone find a way to identify and arrest people distributing malware code or operating botnets who are based in foreign nations. However, hot on the heels of its announcement of a round of arrests of U.S.-based botnet herders and the identification of over one million machines infected by the programs, FBI officials said that international cooperation is playing an increasingly important role in helping it stomp out cyber-crime. "We've been successful in building relationships with foreign law enforcement officials and have agents in 60 countries around the globe working full time on cyber-crime along with police departments and other agencies," said Shawn Henry, deputy assistant director of the Cyber Division at the FBI. "We've seen some significant developments over the last few years in that area." While Henry admitted that the very nature of cutting-edge botnet herders can make them hard to find as perpetrators move from one bank of infected machines to another quickly to avoid detection, he said that partnerships with foreign governments in the name of fighting cyber-crime are playing a vital role in aiding the agency's ability to thwart the attacks. "This type of crime can be committed by someone with minimal resources, sometimes using publicly available tools, which makes it a challenge to identify who is responsible, but international cooperation has allowed us to pursue these efforts in many countries, and we are also helping other nations fight operators located in the U.S. as this is a problem that goes both ways," Henry said. Rounded up by the agency in its most recent botnet hunt were Robert Alan Soloway of Seattle, who has been tabbed as one of the nation's leading sources of botnet-driven spam e-mail, along with James C. Brewer of Arlington, Texas, who is alleged to have infected several Chicago-area hospitals with botnet programs, and Jason Michael Downey of Covington, Kentucky, who is charged with running botnets that were used to carry out so-called denial-of-service attacks. Taking such individuals offline has become a task secondary only to fighting terrorists and spies, according to Henry, who said that the FBI's current leadership is very much focused on expanding its ability to battle cyber-criminals. Whereas the perception within the IT security community has been that computer-based attacks are further down the agency's pecking order and that its efforts to stop such crimes lack the same financial backing as its other pursuits, Henry said that the FBI is taking the problem more seriously than ever before. "Cyber crime is our number three priority behind anti-terrorism and counter-intelligence, we devote a lot of resources to it, and Director Mueller sees it as a significant criminal problem and is very supportive of our efforts," said Henry. "We also get ample support from the U.S. Department of Justice and have been successful with the legal tools that are being made available to us." Despite making headway, Henry said that the battle against botnets and other forms of cyber-crime remains an "electronic cat and mouse game" as once law enforcement officials and the security community identify and block one technique being used by schemers, the perpetrators tend to move on to some newer modus operandi. The FBI assistant director said that as part of its effort to stop botnets and other attacks, it is hoping that businesses and consumers will become more vigilant and aggressive in lending a hand by keeping their computers protected with the latest anti-virus programs. The agency is also advising potential victims of cyber-crime to pursue investigation of such activity by contacting their Internet service providers, and the FBI has said publicly that people should report any suspected illegal activity to such companies rather than communicating problems directly to itself or other law enforcement organizations directly. Security industry experts lauded the FBI's work to identify and detain hackers as part of its Operation Bot Roast, which led to the arrests of Soloway, Brewer, and Downey, but at least one authority said that the agency may be creating false expectations of relief for businesses and consumers by telling them to fight crimes via their ISPs. Web access providers, particularly those that cater to residential markets, have minimized help desk support to save overhead costs, and customers may find themselves with little recourse or being asked to pay for additional security services when they call their ISPs to complain, said Danny McPherson, chief research officer at security filtering specialists Arbor Networks. Arbor provides network behavior analysis tools to a number of well-known ISPs, including AT&T, British Telecom, EarthLink, and NTT. In addition to leaving customers unsatisfied with their ability to respond to attacks, and potentially driving ISPs with minimal support budgets out of business, asking the service providers to become the de facto police for stopping botnet activity is impractical for a number of reasons, McPherson said. "You tend to see a lot of people, not just law enforcement, calling for quarantines of suspected botnet infected IP addresses, but you can't just start blocking legitimate users who may not know they are involved, what if you stop someone from making a VoIP-based emergency services call?" McPherson questioned. "If someone gets blocked by their ISP, they're going to move to another provider; systems and solutions to automate the security defenses needed to address this problem are being developed, but it will take time, and most infrastructure out there won't natively support that sort of work today." McPherson said that it is encouraging to see cooperation between U.S. law enforcement officials, but he believes that the botnet issue will remain a major problem nonetheless. "It's good to see that there is more global information sharing going on, and that local governments are taking responsibility for cleaning up their own backyards, but with millions of bot hosts and more than 90 percent of those outside the U.S., I think they're still only putting a tiny dent in the problem at his point," said McPherson. Other security industry experts agreed that it will take a lot more effort on the part of the international law enforcement community to have any noticeable impact on botnets and other cyber-criminals. However, efforts such as Bot Roast will succeed in forcing botnet operators to increasingly worry that they may indeed be brought to justice for the crimes they commit, said Alan Paller, director of research for IT security training provider SANS Institute. "At his point, the law enforcement community still can't get much done because so many of the perpetrators are located in so many places where there are no cooperative agreements," he said. "But what they are doing is increasing the risk and raising the cost of committing the crimes, which is just what law enforcement is good at; in the end they can't ever really stop people from trying to rob banks, but they can make it really dangerous and costly, just as they always have tried to."
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. Department of Energy has proposed levying a fine of $3 million on the University of California, Berkeley, and a separate $300,000 fine on Los Alamos National Security (LANS) for their alleged failures to protect classified information in an October 2006 security breach. In addition, Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman ordered LANS to undertake specific actions to bolster its physical and IT security. A failure to implement the required measures within the prescribed time frame could result in the imposition of additional civil penalties of up to $100,000 per day for each violation, Bodman said in a compliance order issued today. The formal enforcement actions against both organizations follow months of investigation into the breach in which a contract worker at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) illegally downloaded and removed classified data from the site via a thumb drive. The university managed and operated LANL from 1943 to May 2006. LANS, which is a limited liability corporation that comprises Bechtel, the university, and two other firms, took over management of LANL in June 2006. The university and LANS have 30 days to submit a written response to the notice of violations. A failure to do so would end their right to appeal the proposed penalties. "Investigations revealed that management deficiencies of both contractors were a central contributing factor" in the 2006 breach, a DOE statement said. The agency noted that the proposed civil penalty of $3 million is the largest it has ever assessed. In a formal Preliminary Notice of Violation addressed to Robert Foley, vice president of laboratory management at the University of California, the DOE listed five separate areas where the school failed to follow DOE requirements for protecting classified information. Those violations included a failure by the university to protect data ports, despite knowing about the vulnerability, and a failure to impose adequate escorting requirements to detect unauthorized access and removal of classified data. The school was also charged with violating the DOE's physical security requirements, as well as rules regarding roles and responsibilities and oversight of subcontractors. The notice of violation was sent by the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). In a similar notice to LANS, the NNSA listed many of the same violations. In addition, the NNSA said that LANS failed to stop the unauthorized reproduction of classified material both on paper and on removable electronic media and allowed the material to be stored in a private residence. In a statement, LANL acknowledged the DOE findings and said it has begun to take steps to address the problems. "In addition to creating a new organization to oversee cybersecurity, the Laboratory has already taken important, aggressive actions to reduce the total amount of its classified holdings and to consolidate those holdings into as few areas as possible without damaging productivity," LANL said. On July 10, the laboratory certified a new "super vault-type room" for storing classified data. Classified removable media at the laboratory have also been reduced by more than 85 percent since 2003, while classified repositories have been cut by 23 percent. In addition, processes have been implemented for random searches of personnel entering and exiting classified areas of the laboratory, and for mandatory searches of all those entering and exiting data vaults. "The Laboratory has committed to the DOE and the National Nuclear Security Administration to make security improvements consistent with those outlined in the compliance order," the LANL statement said. The university did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The enforcement actions come just weeks after Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, wrote a letter to Bodman asking why his committee was not informed of another LANL breach involving nuclear secrets in January. Dingell, whose committee was looking into the October 2006 breach, claimed that his committee had deliberately not been informed of the one in January. "We find it unacceptable that throughout this period, several NNSA, Department of Energy, and LANL officials with specific knowledge of this incident met with us on multiple occasions, and a senior LANL official testified twice before the Subcommittee, without mentioning a word about this matter," Dingell wrote.
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A group representing technology industry executives yesterday called on the Bush administration to step up efforts to protect the nation&#39;s computer and Internet infrastructure, and it proposed
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The U.S. government will spend close to $22 billion on IT projects by the end of September, as agencies rush to spend their budgets by the end of the fiscal year, says a report from Input, an analyst focused on government contracts.
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Federal authorities have asked a US District Court judge to shut down an operation that they said installed intrusive spyware on people&#39;s computers and then sold the victims anti-spyware software
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WASHINGTON - The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has seized computers, software and equipment as part of a probe into the illegal sharing of copyrighted movies, music and games over an Internet &#39;peer-to-peer&#39; (P2P) network, Attorney-General John
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The FBI lost 160 laptop computers in less than four years, including at least 10 that contained highly sensitive classified information and one that held "personal identifying information on FBI personnel," according to a new report released today.