BotNet News

Cybercrime is the use of computers and the Internet to commit an illegal act such as trafficking in child pornography, intellectual property, counterfeiting or stealing identities. This crime can be found across the United States and around the world in a variety of forms:

Cybercriminals are constantly seeking new ways to break into systems and steal data. Often, their attacks are designed to be more sophisticated than the average phishing attack. Spear-phishing messages, for instance, are specifically crafted to look like legitimate messages from someone in an organization that the victim trusts (like their CEO or their IT manager). Distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) use multiple compromised devices to overwhelm a system or network with traffic and make it unavailable for users. Zero-day exploits take advantage of unpatched vulnerabilities and can be extremely difficult to recover from.

There is a cyber component to almost every type of investigation HSI conducts, including the unauthorized release of protected personal information; the sale or distribution of child pornography or intellectual property; the theft of funds or assets; and criminal money laundering. In the future, cybercriminals will be even more creative in their attempts to violate our privacy and rights.

Law enforcement agencies and cybersecurity professionals need to work together. They must share resources and best practices to stop cyberattacks before they are successful. This may include using digital forensics tools to recover deleted files or analyze metadata and network traffic logs. They can also use technology to prevent attacks, such as segmentation that divides a network into smaller parts to control access.