By Paula Reed Ward
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
PITTSBURGH — FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III visited Pittsburgh yesterday to tour the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University.
It was part of a regional visit, which included a trip to Penn State University on Tuesday, where he spoke about the changing nature of cyber crime, and the ways federal law enforcement is fighting it.
“It’s no accident that I’m here in Pittsburgh,” Mr. Mueller said, during a brief media availability. “Pittsburgh, for probably 20 years, has been on the cutting edge.”
He noted the expertise by students and faculty at CMU in developing new investigative methods to track down cyber attacks, as well as their efforts to thwart them from the start.
Mr. Mueller, who took over as director just days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, emphasized the importance of law enforcement, the private sector and academia working together to fight cyber crime.
Ronald E. Plesco Jr., the chief executive officer of the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance headquartered in Pittsburgh, said that his organization has some 600 partners. Many of them compete with each other — for instance Microsoft and Google — but in an effort to combat cyber threats, they work together, Mr. Plesco said.
Though the criminals are often slightly ahead in the game, he believes by pooling the resources of so many groups, “we’re able to be on the wave — not necessarily on the tip of the wave.”
Some of the trends that they study and work to eliminate include spam, phishing schemes, and stock-market manipulation.
Mr. Plesco’s organization works to gather intelligence on new scams. That information is then passed on to law enforcement. For instance, he said, the NCFTA developed information on the creation of fake fund-raising sites online, such as ones for victims of Hurricane Katrina, and most recently the fires in Southern California.
Cyber threats will continue to grow as people become more and more dependent upon digital technology, Mr. Mueller said.
And 15 years down the road, because of American dependence on computers and technology, “we will be vulnerable to terrible attacks.”
Among those, Mr. Mueller said, are Botnets, which are networks of computers controlled by hackers. They can do anything from attacking networks, to sending spam to injecting spyware.
Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Mr. Mueller said that national security has improved, noting the elimination of sanctuary for al-Qaida members in Afghanistan, as well as the increased security for U.S. airports, borders and ports.
“All of this makes us safer, certainly, than we were on Sept. 11,” Mr. Mueller said. “While I will say we are safer, that does not mean we are safe.”
Copyright 2007 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette