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Recruiting and researching the hacker community could boost cybersecurity.
Hackers can be tough opponents because the best of them share ideas online about new ways to attack networks and how to hide from law enforcement. Gangs in nations like Russia or China can be particularly resourceful and dangerous – especially since governments there are secretly sponsoring hackers’ efforts and protecting them from international law enforcement, a former top FBI official tells U.S. News.
“Both Russia and China are sponsoring hackers that collect information on behalf of the nation state,” says Shawn Henry, the former executive assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch. “Intellectual property is being funneled to benefit companies in their home countries.”
Submarines, airplanes and medical devices are among the products made by China using intellectual property stolen from networks of U.S. companies, says Henry, who retired from the FBI in 2012 and is now president of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. Along with threatening U.S. national security, theft of intellectual property is among the top reasons hackers cost consumers and companies between $375 and $575 billion each year, according a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies funded by cybersecurity firm McAfee.
To counter well-connected hackers, the FBI and other agencies have been treating them like “a new kind of organized crime” by chasing, researching and recruiting them with methods similar to those used against the Mafia, Henry says. The FBI spent years building successful cases against the Mafia in the U.S. by studying the culture of that community, sharing information on crime rings with other law enforcement agencies and by gaining information directly from the crime groups through undercover agents or protected informants.
iHLS – Israel Homeland Security
Perhaps the most valuable pieces of information hackers sell on the black market are zero days: network vulnerabilities that have not yet been exposed, making them incredibly valuable to criminals looking to stage an attack or companies paying a ransom for their own security.
The U.S. and other intelligence agencies buy zero days off the black market, and it would benefit the Internet community to disclose those vulnerabilities to help fix the security gaps, says James Lewis, a cybersecurity researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But buying zero days and trying to subsidize the hacker community to prevent trouble has its limits, he adds.
Along with buying zero days, the U.S. government also recruits hackers for consultation, but that can be difficult if the hacker is in a foreign country, Lewis says. Recruiting reformed hackers to write code or do counterintelligence against online crime is also a useful tactic as “people grow up” from a youth of infiltrating computers – especially when they find they aren’t invisible to law enforcement, he added.
