FBI Director Christopher Wray delivered the keynote address at 亚色影库CS 2018. (Lee Pellegrini)
What once was the comparatively minor threat of "hacking" has grown into the threat of full-blown economic espionage and extremely lucrative cyber crime, FBI Director Christopher Wray told attendees at the second Boston Conference on Cyber Security (亚色影库CS), held at Boston College on March 7.
And this threat, he said, is coming at us from all sides.
"We鈥檙e worried鈥攁t the FBI and with our partners鈥攁bout a wider range of threat actors, from multi-national cyber syndicates and insider threats to hacktivists," Wray said. "And we鈥檙e concerned about a wider gamut of methods, from botnets to ransomware, from spearfishing and business email compromise to illicit crypto mining and APTs."
Wray delivered the keynote address at 亚色影库CS 2018, a daylong event that brought together academicians, private industry, and law enforcement to collaborate on how to best prevent and respond to attacks on public and private information systems. The conference was organized through a partnership between the FBI and the Cybersecurity Policy and Governance master鈥檚 degree program at the University鈥檚 Woods College of Advancing Studies.
In his remarks, Wray cited an increase in state-sponsored cyber intrusions linked to North Korea and Russia, as well as the 鈥渂lended threat" of "nation-states using criminal hackers to do their dirty work" through increasingly creative avenues. "They are no longer dependent on just intelligence services to carry out their aims," he said. "Instead, they utilize people from all walks of life鈥攈ackers, businesspeople, academics, researchers, diplomats, tourists鈥攁nd anyone else who can get their hands on something of value."
WATCH: FBI Director Christopher Wray at 亚色影库CS 2018: 'The threat we see now is coming at us from all sides.'
The FBI is responding to the growing cyber threat in a variety of ways, Wray said, including building on existing capabilites, strengthening domestic and foreign partnerships and defenses, and blending traditional investigative techniques with technical capabilities鈥攁pproaches that are yielding results, he said.
He pointed to the FBI's success last summer in taking down AlphaBay, the largest marketplace on the DarkNet for the buying and selling of drugs, weapons, malware, stolen identities, and other illegal goods and services.
