Category: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News

Holding Law Enforcement Accountable 

But I’ll start with our efforts to protect Americans’ civil rights by holding law enforcement officers accountable. As part of their vital role in enforcing our laws and keeping us all safe, law enforcement officers have the power to arrest and detain people, to search and seize property, and in some cases even to use deadly force. Given all that tremendous power, it’s our job to step in to investigate allegations of abuse.

Now, let me be clear here. I’m the leader of the world’s premier law enforcement agency, and I’ve spent most of my career proudly working shoulder to shoulder with law enforcement officers. At the FBI, we couldn’t have the impact we do without the partnership of the nearly 6,000 state and local law enforcement officers who work alongside our agents on our various FBI-led task forces.

Last year alone, for instance, the FBI and our law enforcement partners arrested nearly 18,000 violent criminals and child predators. That’s almost 50 bad guys we took off the streets per day, every day—together. So I’ve seen first-hand what they’re made of and what they do to make our communities safer.

The overwhelming majority of officers are in the job because they think of others before themselves, no matter the cost. They’re men and women of courage and character, of dedication and service. They work long hours—longer than most people will ever know—and don’t get paid nearly enough for what they do. Much of their work goes on behind the scenes—and rarely gets the attention or credit it deserves.

To answer the call to go into law enforcement, you’ve got to really want to help people. Because every day, when officers pick up their badges and say goodbye to their families, they know there’s a chance they might not make it home. Just stop for a second and think about what that really means. What it takes for someone to be willing to put their life on the line for another—and I’m not talking about a member of their family—I’m talking about potentially giving up their life to protect a total stranger.

Now think about doing that day after day, year after year for an entire career—and not just while they’re on the job, but when they’re “off duty,” out with their own family, too. It takes a pretty extraordinary person to choose that life.

Which is why when officers violate their oath and hurt the ones they’re sworn to serve instead of protecting them, it’s a discredit to those scores of brave men and women who do the job the right way, each and every day. And it’s why law enforcement at all levels share an interest in holding those who stray accountable.

At the FBI, we fulfill that duty as part of our responsibility to safeguard the civil rights of all Americans. And I can think of no better place to discuss that work than here in Georgia, where the capital’s known as the cradle of the modern civil rights movement.

Today, the FBI is the primary federal agency charged with investigating civil rights violations. And while our work combating hate crimes might be what most people think of when it comes to the Bureau’s civil rights program, another absolutely essential part of it is our investigation of color-of-law violations. Those crimes occur when an individual acting under the authority of federal, state, or local laws—under what’s known as the color of law—willfully deprives someone of their constitutional rights. And that deprivation of rights can run the gamut, from excessive force, false arrest, or obstruction of justice—to sexual assault, withholding medical care, or the failure to keep an individual from harm. While color-of-law violations can be committed by anybody acting under their lawful authority, including probation and corrections officers, public officials, prosecutors, and judges, they too often involve law enforcement officers.

An investigation the FBI’s Jackson, Mississippi, field office conducted last year represents a particularly heinous example. In January 2023, six white law enforcement officers committed some absolutely unspeakable crimes. Without a warrant or any exigent circumstances, the six of them kicked in the door of a home where two Black men were staying and subjected them to an hour and a half of pure hell. Despite having no probable cause to believe either had committed a crime, the six officers: handcuffed and arrested the men; kicked and beat them; bombarded them with racial slurs; forced them to strip naked; assaulted them with a variety of objects; tased them—not once, but 17 times; and fired their guns to intimidate them.

But apparently that wasn’t enough for these defendants. One of them had the idea to stage a mock execution. So he took his weapon and secretly removed a bullet from the chamber. He put the barrel into one victim’s mouth and pulled the trigger, dry-firing the gun. Then he did it again—but this time, the gun didn’t dry-fire. It discharged, sending a bullet into the victim’s mouth, lacerating his tongue, and breaking his jaw.

Can you imagine the abject terror those two victims must have felt? I mean, who do you call when the police are the ones terrorizing you? No human being should ever be subjected to the torture, the trauma, the horrific acts of violence carried out by those individuals. 

As their gunshot victim lay bleeding on the floor, what do you think these six law enforcement officers—men who had sworn an oath to protect and serve—did next? I can tell you they didn’t render aid. Instead, they came up with a cover story and then took steps to corroborate it. They planted a gun on one of the victims; destroyed surveillance video, spent shell casings, and taser cartridges; submitted phony drug evidence to the crime lab; filed false reports; charged one of the victims with crimes he had not committed; made false statements to investigators; and pressured witnesses to stick to their cover story.

All of that came out through the course of the FBI’s investigation. We also found that in addition to those offenses, three of the officers had committed other color-of-law violations just a month earlier, when one of them beat another man, tased him, and fired a gun near his head attempting to coerce a confession, while the other two failed to intervene.

I recognize that what happened in Mississippi is an extreme example. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a more atrocious set of civil rights violations than those carried out by these guys. But on the flip side, it’s hard to imagine more important work than investigating those crimes and seeking justice for the victims. As the result of the Bureau’s color-of-law investigation, which we worked in collaboration with our federal and state partners, all six pled guilty last August and are now waiting to be sentenced.

The contrast between the vast majority of law enforcement officers who are in the job for the right reasons, to help people and keep communities safe—and the others, like those six in Mississippi, who instead use their power and authority to hurt the most vulnerable—that contrast is what makes color-of-law violations so immensely harmful.

We’ve entrusted law enforcement officers with vast power and authority. And when they abuse it—when they operate as though they’re above the law—they’re not just depriving victims of their civil rights. They’re degrading the public’s trust in our criminal justice system, one violation at a time. And that’s why the FBI’s work investigating these kinds of abuses is among our most important responsibilities.

The philosopher David Hume wrote that the corruption of the best things produces the worst. I know firsthand the men and women who choose a career of protecting others to be some of the very best among us. But while officers-turned-criminals make up a tiny fraction of the law enforcement community, the harm they do has the worst possible effect. Because no matter how infrequent, when officers violate the civil rights of ordinary citizens, it erodes trust—often in our most vulnerable communities—making the job that much harder for the honest men and women who do things the right way.

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News

In total, the FBI recovered 22 artifacts: six painted scrolls from the 18th-19th centuries (three of which were one piece and appear to have been divided into three pieces), a hand-drawn map of Okinawa dating back to the 19th century, and various pieces of pottery and ceramics. A typewritten letter was also found with the artifacts in Massachusetts that helped confirm they were looted during the last days of World War II. 

“When taken together, they really represent a substantial piece of Okinawan history,” said Kelly.

The FBI transported the artifacts from Massachusetts to Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C., where the scrolls were unfurled for the first time in many years, revealing portraits of Okinawan royalty in vivid reds, golds, and blue accents. 

“It’s an exciting moment when you when you watch the scroll unfurl in front of you,” said Kelly. “You witness history, and you witness something that hasn’t been seen by many people in a very long time.”

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News

Innovation / Emerging Tech 

The first is the importance of innovation in staying ahead of the threats we tackle.

Technology is constantly evolving in ways that both expand the battle surface and provide new avenues for taking the fight to our adversaries.

Cyber is probably the most obvious example.

When I was your age, the idea that one of DOD’s unified combatant commands would be dedicated to protecting cyberspace would have sounded like science fiction. Now, I talk to Gen. [Timothy D.] Haugh, who leads USCYBERCOM [U.S. Cyber Command], and Gen. [Paul M.] Nakasone before him, just about every other week.

Even within that mission set, we’ve worked together across government to innovate—moving from a defensive mindset to one that’s more offensive. That means coordinating with our partners on joint, sequenced operations designed to maximize impact on our adversaries.

I’m talking about things like Operation Medusa, a joint, sequenced operation that included using sophisticated technical means to force Snake—the Russian FSB’s [Federal Security Service’s] most sophisticated malware—to effectively cannibalize itself. We took down Snake in over 50 countries, with the help of our U.S. and more than half a dozen foreign partners.

Another example: the year-and-a-half-long campaign we waged—with our European partners—to hack the hackers of Hive, a ransomware group targeting hospitals, schools, and emergency services, whose servers and websites we seized and shut down, and whose victims we saved from tens of millions in ransom payments by using our access to decrypt their networks.

And just a few weeks ago, we announced Operation Dying Ember, where we worked with our U.S.—and, again, worldwide—law enforcement partners to run a court-authorized technical operation to kick the Russian GRU [Main Intelligence Directorate] off well over 1,000 home and small business routers and lock the door behind them, killing the GRU’s access to a botnet it was piggybacking to run cyber operations against countries around the world, including America and its allies in Europe.

But changes in technology aren’t just about expanding the battle surface. Emerging technology also impacts the way both the FBI and our armed forces tackle existing threats—both in terms of opportunities and risks.

In this job—and maybe you can relate to this—whenever I learn about some new technology, I find myself thinking, “Wow, we can do that?!” And then, when I stop to think about it a little more, I’m like, “Oh brother: They can do that, too.”

Advances in AI [artificial intelligence]—and generative AI, in particular—are a good example. We’re all, of course, exploring how AI can advance our mission by making us more efficient, helping us triage and process data, and enhancing our ability to detect threats. But maybe even more importantly, we’re focused on understanding and stopping all the bad things our adversaries can do with AI.

Across nearly every category of threat we deal with, we’re seeing our adversaries researching and now beginning to employ AI to make themselves more dangerous. Terrorists are using AI to access dangerous bomb-making information, and write more convincing propaganda. Hackers are using AI to identify new vulnerabilities and write better malicious code to exploit them. It’s making amateur hackers competent and competent hackers advanced by helping them blend in and suggesting code they might not otherwise have been able to write.

There’s a lot of AI-enhanced or -enabled danger for us to battle already, and more coming down the road—all of which highlights the importance, for both the FBI and our nation’s military, of innovation: finding new ways to be more efficient, more agile, and more resilient to prepare ourselves for five, 10, 20 years down the road. 

Maintain Focus  

Another common feature of our work is kind of the flip side of keeping up with evolving threats, and that’s the importance of never losing focus or taking our eye off the ball when it comes to existing threats.

It’s long been the case that the public and the media are quick to declare one threat over and gone, while they obsess over whatever’s shiny and new. But one thing I’ve learned from the different jobs I’ve held in government is that what’s old is often new again, and nothing ever seems to go away.

When I was coming out of college, the Cold War was ending, the Soviet Union was collapsing, and we were told it was the end of great-power competition. Anyone hear anything about Russia recently? 

Our counterintelligence folks spend countless hours combatting Russia’s efforts to steal our government secrets and sow division through human intelligence operations, sophisticated cyber intrusions, signals collection platforms, and foreign malign influence campaigns 

And what about China? 

The Chinese Communist Party has shown it’s willing to lie, cheat, and steal its way to achieve its ambition of becoming the world’s one and only superpower. There’s no question in my mind that the greatest long-term threat to our nation’s ideas, innovation, and economic security—our national security—is the People’s Republic of China.

At one point recently, the FBI was opening a new China-related counterintelligence investigation every 12 hours.

And you talk about cyber.

China’s vast hacking program is the world’s largest, and they’ve stolen more U.S. data than every other nation combined, so despite what folks may have thought in the early nineties, great-power competition is far from over.

Counterterrorism is another great example. On September 11, 2001, I was a relatively new official in the Justice Department’s leadership. I spent most of 9/11 in a packed command center at FBI Headquarters with former Director [Robert] Mueller and then-Attorney General [John] Ashcroft. On that day—and in the months and years that followed—we were laser-focused in our determination to prevent an attack by a foreign terrorist organization on American soil from ever happening again.

After 9/11, the FBI transformed the way we do business. We became an intelligence-driven national security and law enforcement organization—one that collects, uses, and shares intelligence in everything we do. We changed our focus from investigating terrorist plots and attacks after the fact, to stopping them before they occur. We broke down walls and emphasized partnership with law enforcement and the rest of the Intelligence Community. And we made protecting the United States from terrorist attacks the FBI’s number-one priority.

Fast-forward to when I took this job in 2017: Many of those changes were, by then, taken for granted.

In fact, some commentators were criticizing the FBI for maintaining counterterrorism as our top priority—claiming the threat from foreign terrorist organizations was over. How does that sound now after October 7—when one of our closest allies was attacked by Hamas terrorists, who killed something like 1,300 people that day? And that’s in a country with a total population of less than 10 million. Put another way, in America, that would be something like killing nearly 40,000 people in a single day.

In recent months, we’ve seen a rogue’s gallery of foreign terrorist organizations call for attacks against Americans and our allies:

• Hizballah expressed its support and praise for Hamas and now poses a constant threat to U.S. interests in the region.
• Al Qaeda issued its most specific call to attack the United States in the last five years.
• Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—or AQAP—called on jihadists to attack Americans and Jewish people everywhere.
• And ISIS urged its followers to target Jewish communities both in Europe and the United States itself  

As you probably know, these are groups that haven’t always seen eye to eye—and that’s putting it mildly—now united in their calls for attacks on us. Those events obviously have a profound effect on our troops serving overseas, but they also have implications for our homeland security. I’ve been very public in saying that, in a year when the terrorism threat was already elevated, the ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans inside the United States to a whole ‘nother level.

Although we cannot and do not discount the possibility of another coordinated 9/11-style attack by a foreign terrorist organization, our most immediate concern has been that individuals or small groups will draw twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home. And over the past five months, our Counterterrorism Division agents have been urgently running down thousands of reported threats stemming from the conflict. Even though we’re starting to see those numbers level off, we expect that October 7 and the conflict that’s followed will feed a pipeline of radicalization and mobilization for years to come, [the] point being: The threat of terrorism has not gone away, and it’s not going to, any time soon.

I recently sat down with a former senior intelligence official who talked about how she hates the term “pivot”—the idea that we can simply move on from one threat to the next. In our line of work—whether you’re a special agent or intel analyst at the FBI, or a second lieutenant in the Army—we almost never “pivot” away from a threat. We just end up having to cover down on more and more threats as things evolve. We don’t have the luxury of pivoting or just moving on. We’ve got to continue doing the hard work of staying focused on an expanding array of threats, to keep Americans safe.

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News

My Leadership Philosophy

One thing I learned pretty fast in leadership positions was that I needed a guide I could follow to help me become the best leader I could be.  
So through a lot of trial and error, watching good and bad leaders, I developed a leadership philosophy, which I have written and committed to memory. And I strongly believe that everyone—regardless of where you are in your career—should have one. Your personal philosophy is a commitment to your way of effectively leading others. Defining who you need to be. 

My personal leadership philosophy is threefold. One, you have to be a leader of character. Two, you have to be competent. Three, you have to have empathy.  

So, let me dig into each of those, and I’ll start with character. I believe leadership is earning your team’s trust and respect so that they will follow you. So when you tell your squad, “Hey, I’m all about teamwork,” or “I have an open-door policy,” you better be a team player, and your door better be open. Your actions must match your words. 

One of the most effective ways to motivate your team is for them to see you engaged and driven. People do as they see. Effective leadership is a gift of trust from your employees, and you have to earn it every day. 

Next, I believe leaders have to be competent. That does not mean knowing everything from the moment you show up to a new assignment or take a new role. You might not be well-versed in the program you’re in charge of. You might not know the people you’re managing. So you have to put in the work to understand what your people are doing well enough to lead them. 

And if you give it time, you’ll work through it. You’ll gain a vision for that organization, and you’ll improve things. Because when you own the program, it’s up to you to put together a strategy and lead it effectively. That can be and should be challenging—or else you wouldn’t be growing. 

Finally, and most important, is empathy. Now sure, I see a leader’s primary role as helping your people—from individual employees to small squads to large divisions—execute their mission priorities. But we cannot forget the human element in all of that. Leaders often fail when they lack compassion. Our priority should be to serve those who serve. 

Another way to say that is, “Mission first, people always.”

And as a leader, you need to make sure your people know they’re more than just employees to you. They need to know you care about who they are. Not just when they’re in the office, but outside of work, too. The only way you can do that is by listening to what they share with you. 
Caring about people—understanding and having empathy for them, being able to see things from their point of view—that’s essential to being a good leader. 

But it’s important to care about every person in the room. To know where they’re coming from and why. 

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News

The owner of two purported telemedicine companies pleaded guilty today to her role in a conspiracy to defraud Medicare of $136 million.

According to court documents, Jean Wilson, 52, of Richmond Hill, Georgia, was a licensed nurse practitioner in New Jersey. Wilson owned two purported telemedicine companies, Advantage Choice Care LLC (ACC) and Tele Medcare LLC (Tele Medcare), and two orthotic brace suppliers, Southeastern DME and Choice Care Medical. Wilson, through these companies, recruited medical professionals who were bribed to sign prescriptions for Medicare beneficiaries for orthotic braces and prescription drugs that were medically unnecessary, ineligible for Medicare reimbursement, or not provided as represented. In certain instances, Wilson only paid providers when they signed orthotic brace orders. The medical professionals Wilson recruited would often sign the orthotic brace orders based solely on a brief telephonic interaction with the beneficiary, or no interaction at all. Wilson and the medical providers she retained frequently signed false and misleading documentation to support claims to Medicare.

During the conspiracy, Wilson and others submitted, or caused the submission of, false and fraudulent claims to Medicare, Medicare sponsors, and Medicare Part D plans in excess of approximately $136 million for orthotic braces and prescription drugs that were medically unnecessary, ineligible for Medicare reimbursement, or not provided as represented. Medicare, Medicare sponsors, and Medicare Part D plans paid at least $66 million for these claims.

Wilson pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud. She is scheduled to be sentenced on July 18 and faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. As part of her plea, she has agreed to pay over $66 million in restitution to Medicare and the IRS. A federal district judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors. 

Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Special Agent in Charge Naomi Gruchacz of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG), Special Agent in Charge James Dennehy of the FBI Newark Field Office, and Special Agent in Charge Tammy Tomlins of the IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) Newark Field Office made the announcement.

The HHS-OIG, FBI, and IRS-CI are investigating the case.

Trial Attorneys Darren C. Halverson and Nicholas K. Peone of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section are prosecuting the case.

The Fraud Section leads the Criminal Division’s efforts to combat health care fraud through the Health Care Fraud Strike Force Program. Since March 2007, this program, currently comprised of nine strike forces operating in 27 federal districts, has charged more than 5,400 defendants who collectively have billed federal health care programs and private insurers more than $27 billion. In addition, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, working in conjunction with HHS-OIG, are taking steps to hold providers accountable for their involvement in health care fraud schemes. More information can be found at www.justice.gov/criminal-fraud/health-care-fraud-unit.

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News

Thank you, Steve, and thank you all for the warm welcome.

I hope that video helped wake everyone up after lunch.

I get to speak with a whole bunch of different groups in this job, which is great, but I’ve been really looking forward to the chance to meet with all of you, in particular.

I consider it an honor to be able to participate in your Commandant’s Hour.

I’ve always had a ton of respect for all of you and the commitment you’ve made, and after walking around this morning and seeing all that you get done in a day, that respect has gone through the roof. You are our country’s future leaders, and from what I’ve seen today, I know we’re in good hands 

Ways We Work Together 

One of the things that’s struck me in this job is how much the FBI and the Army, along with the rest of our armed forces, lean on each other. Although we encounter different risks and have different responsibilities, I think people would be surprised by how often we partner up.

Over the past two decades we’ve worked shoulder-to-shoulder to find, apprehend, and prosecute foreign terrorists. We’ve teamed up on the trials in Guantanamo Bay. We’re collaborating on emerging technology at the Army Futures Command—where our current FBI detailee is himself a West Point grad. We’re even fighting crime together with the Joint Interagency Task Force, South, out of Key West, where the FBI contributes to more than half of the prosecutions coming from the work detecting the illicit trafficking of drugs, people, and weapons.

We’re serving alongside you in posts around the world in our more than 100 legal attaché and liaison offices.

We’re working together on mission areas as diverse as hostage rescue, human intelligence, and special warfare.

We have DOD [Department of Defense] representatives, including military officers, working shoulder-to-shoulder with FBI agents and analysts on our national counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cyber investigative task forces. 

So for the 104 members of the West Point Class of 2024 who selected cyber or military intelligence on Branch Night, we’ll be working together real soon.

I even have senior reps from DIA [the Defense Intelligence Agency] and NSA [National Security Agency] sitting in my meeting with the top FBI executives every morning.

The reality is: No matter which Army career branch you’ve been assigned to, there’s a good chance you’ll end up partnering with the FBI. But beyond the places where our folks’ paths may cross with yours, our missions share a few key elements, and it’s those common themes that I want to spend the next few minutes talking about before we get into whatever’s on your mind.

Innovation / Emerging Tech 

The first is the importance of innovation in staying ahead of the threats we tackle.

Technology is constantly evolving in ways that both expand the battle surface and provide new avenues for taking the fight to our adversaries.

Cyber is probably the most obvious example.

When I was your age, the idea that one of DOD’s unified combatant commands would be dedicated to protecting cyberspace would have sounded like science fiction. Now, I talk to Gen. [Timothy D.] Haugh, who leads USCYBERCOM [U.S. Cyber Command], and Gen. [Paul M.] Nakasone before him, just about every other week.

Even within that mission set, we’ve worked together across government to innovate—moving from a defensive mindset to one that’s more offensive. That means coordinating with our partners on joint, sequenced operations designed to maximize impact on our adversaries.

I’m talking about things like Operation Medusa, a joint, sequenced operation that included using sophisticated technical means to force Snake—the Russian FSB’s [Federal Security Service’s] most sophisticated malware—to effectively cannibalize itself. We took down Snake in over 50 countries, with the help of our U.S. and more than half a dozen foreign partners.

Another example: the year-and-a-half-long campaign we waged—with our European partners—to hack the hackers of Hive, a ransomware group targeting hospitals, schools, and emergency services, whose servers and websites we seized and shut down, and whose victims we saved from tens of millions in ransom payments by using our access to decrypt their networks.

And just a few weeks ago, we announced Operation Dying Ember, where we worked with our U.S.—and, again, worldwide—law enforcement partners to run a court-authorized technical operation to kick the Russian GRU [Main Intelligence Directorate] off well over 1,000 home and small business routers and lock the door behind them, killing the GRU’s access to a botnet it was piggybacking to run cyber operations against countries around the world, including America and its allies in Europe.

But changes in technology aren’t just about expanding the battle surface. Emerging technology also impacts the way both the FBI and our armed forces tackle existing threats—both in terms of opportunities and risks.

In this job—and maybe you can relate to this—whenever I learn about some new technology, I find myself thinking, “Wow, we can do that?!” And then, when I stop to think about it a little more, I’m like, “Oh brother: They can do that, too.”

Advances in AI [artificial intelligence]—and generative AI, in particular—are a good example. We’re all, of course, exploring how AI can advance our mission by making us more efficient, helping us triage and process data, and enhancing our ability to detect threats. But maybe even more importantly, we’re focused on understanding and stopping all the bad things our adversaries can do with AI.

Across nearly every category of threat we deal with, we’re seeing our adversaries researching and now beginning to employ AI to make themselves more dangerous. Terrorists are using AI to access dangerous bomb-making information, and write more convincing propaganda. Hackers are using AI to identify new vulnerabilities and write better malicious code to exploit them. It’s making amateur hackers competent and competent hackers advanced by helping them blend in and suggesting code they might not otherwise have been able to write.

There’s a lot of AI-enhanced or -enabled danger for us to battle already, and more coming down the road—all of which highlights the importance, for both the FBI and our nation’s military, of innovation: finding new ways to be more efficient, more agile, and more resilient to prepare ourselves for five, 10, 20 years down the road. 

Maintain Focus  

Another common feature of our work is kind of the flip side of keeping up with evolving threats, and that’s the importance of never losing focus or taking our eye off the ball when it comes to existing threats.

It’s long been the case that the public and the media are quick to declare one threat over and gone, while they obsess over whatever’s shiny and new. But one thing I’ve learned from the different jobs I’ve held in government is that what’s old is often new again, and nothing ever seems to go away.

When I was coming out of college, the Cold War was ending, the Soviet Union was collapsing, and we were told it was the end of great-power competition. Anyone hear anything about Russia recently? 

Our counterintelligence folks spend countless hours combatting Russia’s efforts to steal our government secrets and sow division through human intelligence operations, sophisticated cyber intrusions, signals collection platforms, and foreign malign influence campaigns 

And what about China? 

The Chinese Communist Party has shown it’s willing to lie, cheat, and steal its way to achieve its ambition of becoming the world’s one and only superpower. There’s no question in my mind that the greatest long-term threat to our nation’s ideas, innovation, and economic security—our national security—is the People’s Republic of China.

At one point recently, the FBI was opening a new China-related counterintelligence investigation every 12 hours.

And you talk about cyber.

China’s vast hacking program is the world’s largest, and they’ve stolen more U.S. data than every other nation combined, so despite what folks may have thought in the early nineties, great-power competition is far from over.

Counterterrorism is another great example. On September 11, 2001, I was a relatively new official in the Justice Department’s leadership. I spent most of 9/11 in a packed command center at FBI Headquarters with former Director [Robert] Mueller and then-Attorney General [John] Ashcroft. On that day—and in the months and years that followed—we were laser-focused in our determination to prevent an attack by a foreign terrorist organization on American soil from ever happening again.

After 9/11, the FBI transformed the way we do business. We became an intelligence-driven national security and law enforcement organization—one that collects, uses, and shares intelligence in everything we do. We changed our focus from investigating terrorist plots and attacks after the fact, to stopping them before they occur. We broke down walls and emphasized partnership with law enforcement and the rest of the Intelligence Community. And we made protecting the United States from terrorist attacks the FBI’s number-one priority.

Fast-forward to when I took this job in 2017: Many of those changes were, by then, taken for granted.

In fact, some commentators were criticizing the FBI for maintaining counterterrorism as our top priority—claiming the threat from foreign terrorist organizations was over. How does that sound now after October 7—when one of our closest allies was attacked by Hamas terrorists, who killed something like 1,300 people that day? And that’s in a country with a total population of less than 10 million. Put another way, in America, that would be something like killing nearly 40,000 people in a single day.

In recent months, we’ve seen a rogue’s gallery of foreign terrorist organizations call for attacks against Americans and our allies:

• Hizballah expressed its support and praise for Hamas and now poses a constant threat to U.S. interests in the region.
• Al Qaeda issued its most specific call to attack the United States in the last five years.
• Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—or AQAP—called on jihadists to attack Americans and Jewish people everywhere.
• And ISIS urged its followers to target Jewish communities both in Europe and the United States itself  

As you probably know, these are groups that haven’t always seen eye to eye—and that’s putting it mildly—now united in their calls for attacks on us. Those events obviously have a profound effect on our troops serving overseas, but they also have implications for our homeland security. I’ve been very public in saying that, in a year when the terrorism threat was already elevated, the ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans inside the United States to a whole ‘nother level.

Although we cannot and do not discount the possibility of another coordinated 9/11-style attack by a foreign terrorist organization, our most immediate concern has been that individuals or small groups will draw twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home. And over the past five months, our Counterterrorism Division agents have been urgently running down thousands of reported threats stemming from the conflict. Even though we’re starting to see those numbers level off, we expect that October 7 and the conflict that’s followed will feed a pipeline of radicalization and mobilization for years to come, [the] point being: The threat of terrorism has not gone away, and it’s not going to, any time soon.

I recently sat down with a former senior intelligence official who talked about how she hates the term “pivot”—the idea that we can simply move on from one threat to the next. In our line of work—whether you’re a special agent or intel analyst at the FBI, or a second lieutenant in the Army—we almost never “pivot” away from a threat. We just end up having to cover down on more and more threats as things evolve. We don’t have the luxury of pivoting or just moving on. We’ve got to continue doing the hard work of staying focused on an expanding array of threats, to keep Americans safe.

Commitment to Service 

Which leads me to the last common feature I want to highlight, and that’s our shared commitment to service. The FBI’s special agents, intelligence analysts, and professional staff are motivated by the same sense of patriotism and duty as the Corps [of Cadets] and soldiers around the world.

Like you, everything we do is driven by our mission—protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution.

We’ll always have a bond with those in careers of service protecting Americans, and with anyone committed to the values of duty, honor, country.

When it comes to special agents—and law enforcement jobs more generally—I’ve long said it takes an incredibly special person to wake up every morning willing to put his or her life on the line for a total stranger, day after day. The same is certainly true for all of you and the commitment you’ve made.

At the FBI, we’ve got almost 8,000 veterans among our 38,000 employees—including 179 who attended West Point—and it’s easy to see why so many veterans find working at the Bureau a natural fit: It’s a chance to keep serving a cause greater than themselves.

Among those is our Associate Deputy Director, Brian Turner, who was Class of ’91 and wants me to give a shout-out to Company I-2. Go Moose!

Brian is now the number-three executive in the Bureau and our second-highest ranking special agent.

So, I want you all to know that whenever your Army career comes to a close, the FBI would welcome you, too.

It’s like I tell my folks: We’ve got to always be recruiting. In fact, it’s my understanding the Bureau recruited Brian away from a position as a West Point instructor to an incredible career with the FBI—I’m just saying.

With that, I want to thank you again for having me here today. You represent the best of our country and set a standard to which we should all aspire. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News

Good morning, and thanks for having me.

It’s great to be here with this group, because I appreciate the way INSA [the Intelligence and National Security Alliance] has—for years—brought together the public, private, and academic sectors of the intelligence and national security communities to find practical and creative solutions to national security challenges.

That work is more important now than ever, because—as this group knows all too well—there’s no shortage of those challenges out there. So, I look forward to the conversation with Sue [Gordon] in a few minutes about some of the specific challenges we’re facing and how we’re tackling those.

But, before we get into the discussion, I want to take just a few minutes to talk about what I see as the FBI’s unique and valuable role in our integrated Intelligence Community, the new strategy we’re rolling out for our intelligence program to maximize our contributions to the USIC [U.S. Intelligence Community], and—before I close—I also want to highlight one threat, in particular, that’s front of mind for all of us this year: election security. Because, when it comes to election security, intelligence professionals across the government have to make sure we’re all leveraging our very best intelligence to combat this threat together.

FBI’s Dual Role 

For all 115 years of our existence, the FBI has had a dual and complementary mission: enforcing federal law and protecting national security. And, though it might have seemed novel back in 1908, that dual role, in some ways, is tailor-made for today’s challenges.

Our adversaries would like to exploit the gaps they perceive in the U.S. system between how we approach national security and criminal threats and how we share responsibility among the government, academic, and private sectors for defending critical technology, intellectual property, and critical infrastructure.

But all of us in this room know that a division of labor does not mean we’re divided. On the contrary, the fact that we’re all here together is a testament to our commitment to joint efforts. It does mean, though, that each of us—regardless of sector or agency—has to invest time to understand each other’s strengths, how to work with one another, how to share information with one another.

That’s why it’s so important to me that our partners understand what the FBI uniquely brings to the table, not because I’m tooting the FBI’s horn—though that does come with the job—but because partnerships and our ability to leverage all our strengths, together, is our greatest asset.

The FBI can bridge many of those gaps our enemies want to exploit thanks to our unique combination of law enforcement and intelligence authorities, our domestic and international presence, and our ability to directly engage with both the IC [Intelligence Community] and the private sector. And in this world of increasingly complex threats, we at the FBI are striving to use every legal tool at our disposal.

As a member of both the global law enforcement community, with Title 18 authorities, and the IC, with Title 50 authorities, we can focus our efforts in multiple directions and support a broad range of partners to collect intelligence and act on it. So, depending on the situation, we can use criminal legal process—things like subpoenas, search warrants, and wiretaps—or national security tools, like the critically important FISA 702. Our robust human-source programs facilitate our collection of human intelligence using confidential sources and undercover operations, and our law enforcement status puts us in a position to request evidence held overseas through our foreign partners.

As one of our senior executives likes to say, the FBI is like a Swiss Army knife: We have a tool for almost every occasion, and you want to have us in reach when you need us.

FBI Intel Program Strategy  

At a time when threats are more global and complex than ever before—but our resources are more limited—we have to make the best use of every capability I just described to be successful.

Put simply, we need to reduce our risk and maximize our advantage, and that’s why we recently released a new, five-year intelligence program strategy. That intel program strategy emphasizes three levers—technology, tradecraft, and training—to help us do just that.

The first, technology, is key to addressing a rapidly evolving environment where every adversary we face—whether they’re motivated by greed, harm, or global advantage—is using technology to make their efforts more impactful and less traceable and a deluge of data is overwhelming human capacity to process, exploit, assess, share, and act on it in a timely way.

In Sue’s day, ODNI [the Office of the Director of National Intelligence] was forward-thinking in identifying the need to augment our greatest resource—our human talent—with tools and technology to reduce the risk of missing important threat signals amid all the noise. Today, just one investigation of a cyber intrusion could bring in terabytes of data, and we have to be able to quickly distill that information so we can find the needles in an ever-growing haystack. We need to exploit data we’ve lawfully obtained and apply advanced tools and analytics to glean all the insight that data can give us, as fast as we can.

Part of how we’ll get there is by recruiting and developing an FBI cadre of dedicated data professionals, while also training our intelligence workforce to increase their data acumen and enhancing this talent with cutting-edge tools—including those developed by our IC and private industry partners. In fact, just recently, one of our FBI scientists patented a program that will potentially help us address threats posed by synthetic content, which I think all of us in the IC and in law enforcement are highly concerned about. We’re also deploying tools like photo recognition, obtained from outside vendors but honed at the Bureau, to better I.D. things like guns. Under our new intelligence program strategy, we’ll continue to innovate our way toward solutions like these.

The second lever is tradecraft, which is a term we apply to how we produce analysis and how we recruit and operate confidential human sources.

Both analytic and HUMINT [human intelligence] tradecraft are the means by which we ensure integrity, objectivity, and rigor in our intelligence work, because—as I tell our new analysts as they graduate—intelligence isn’t always clear cut. It doesn’t come with a label, and it’s often more of an art than a science.

We’re elevating the tradecraft we use to recruit and operate human sources securely, with a goal of training all special agents to a high level by the time they end their two-year probationary period. The goal is to equip them to balance the risks we have to mitigate with the risks we have to take to collect intelligence that will identify threats and keep Americans safe, and to prepare them to navigate the threat of ubiquitous data collection—what we at the FBI often refer to as ubiquitous technical surveillance, or UTS—to describe how our adversaries can exploit the digital trail we all leave behind. UTS poses a threat not only to our sources and operations, but also to FBI personnel themselves.

So the way we conduct our business—whether that’s making a procurement decision or proposing a joint source operation with a partner overseas—has to account for the tradecraft needed to protect our people and operations.

The FBI is recognized among the IC as an agency on the forefront of training and awareness on this issue, but this is one area where we need every IC agency’s capabilities and expertise to counter the threats, as well as productive partnerships with the private sector to develop tools that will help us secure our operations and our people.

It’s also critical that everyone in the FBI who writes and reviews analysis applies a consistently high level of analytic tradecraft—no matter what program they work, or what job role they have. That’s all the more important today, when disinformation and distrust cloud the environment in which intelligence is collected, analyzed, and received. So, we’ve got to be sure the tradecraft we use in our analysis is beyond reproach. In the words of Linda Weissgold, it’s tradecraft and proper coordination that turn one individual’s analysis into an IC product we can all stand behind.

Our intel program strategy emphasizes our responsibility to deliver exceptional analysis that enables action, providing insights unique to our place as the lead intelligence agency operating domestically, getting that analysis in the hands of those who need it (whether that’s state and local law enforcement, academia, private industry, other government agencies, or foreign partners), and strategically embedding our personnel in the places where they can strengthen the connection between FBI intelligence and its consumers.

That brings me to the third lever in our intel strategy, training, which focuses on building on the multidisciplinary, team approach that’s so important to our work, emphasizing to our new agents that they’re collectors and consumers of intelligence—as well as investigators—and reinforcing the training our analysts, linguists, and professional staff receive to understand how their work feeds our operations.

The key to this is giving all our employees a common baseline so they can intuitively form cohesive teams and tap into the expertise of all job roles and, ultimately, understand how to apply the full range of our authorities and capabilities to ensure we’re leveraging everything we have in everything we do.

That’s the roadmap we’ll use to better position ourselves to meet our intelligence mission: to identify threats and opportunities, inform decision-making, and avoid surprise. It challenges all of us in the FBI—no matter what threat program we focus on—to think differently, work more closely together, and lean into all of our authorities and capabilities.

Election Year 

As I mentioned at the outset, one threat where an intelligence-driven, team approach is absolutely vital is the threat foreign adversaries pose to our free and fair elections.

The U.S. has confronted foreign malign influence threats in the past, but this election cycle, the U.S. will face more adversaries, moving at a faster pace, and enabled by new technology. Advances in generative AI [artificial intelligence], for instance, are lowering the barrier to entry—making it easier for both more and less-sophisticated foreign adversaries to engage in malign influence, while making foreign-influence efforts by players old and new more realistic and difficult to detect.

Defending against these evolving threats requires us all to be lashed tightly together to continue hitting these threats together, early and hard. For us at the FBI, that means close collaboration with intelligence professionals like you from all of our partner agencies—NSA [the National Security Agency], U.S. Cyber Command, CIA [the Central Intelligence Agency], etc. We’re also working with state and local policymakers and election authorities that oversee nearly all the actual running of elections in the U.S., as well as CISA [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency]. And, vitally, we’re working with the private sector, as well, where appropriate.

In all these partnerships, we’re sharing information and creating a stronger joint defense so we can more effectively identify and disrupt any threats to our nation’s elections.

And, as intelligence professionals, we’ve got to highlight threats in specific, evidence-based ways so that we’re usefully arming our partners and, in particular, the public against the kinds of foreign-influence operations they’re likely to confront.

So, while the threats are moving faster and have grown more complex, I’m confident that our partnerships—across the government and the private sector—are better than ever, and that our combat-tempo response to election threats will remain as fast, well-coordinated, and skillful as ever.

Conclusion 

So, before I close, I just want to say once more how much I appreciate the partnerships represented here today. It’s one of our greatest advantages that we gather in settings like this to learn from each other and explore how we can get better, together—and that we look forward to doing it. And that’s not something, I bet, the Russian or Chinese services are doing. So, it’s in that spirit that I’m grateful for the opportunity to spend time with you this morning and to share how the FBI is ensuring we’re doing our part in contributing to our country and its security.

Thanks, and I look forward to our discussion.

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News

I’m pleased to represent the FBI here today, as I oversee the FBI’s Cyber Operations Branch.

I am excited to speak about our multi-year disruption campaign against the LockBit ransomware group.

LockBit has hurt thousands of victims across the country and around the world to include in recent years, targeting all sectors, from government and public sector companies, such as hospitals and schools, to high-profile, global companies.

Today, a joint sequenced operation among 10 countries disrupted LockBit’s front- and back-end infrastructure in the U.S. and abroad.

The FBI seized four servers in the U.S. as part of this technical disruption, and we are announcing a total of five LockBit affiliates charged by the Department of Justice.

Two of those indictments are being publicly released today.

In addition, the cyber-related sanctions program implemented by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) imposed sanctions on two LockBit threat actors responsible for malicious cyber-enabled activities.

Lastly, we can proudly announce through the U.S. Department of State a reward of up to $15 million via the Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program for anyone with information about LockBit associates.

This includes a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of any individual(s) who hold a leadership position in the LockBit ransomware variant transnational organized crime group and a reward offer of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of any individual conspiring to participate in or attempting to participate in LockBit ransomware activities.

This large operation could not have happened without the contributions of the National Crime Agency, FBI Newark, our international partners, the FBI’s Cyber Division—including our field office personnel across the country—and the FBI personnel stationed overseas, who led the collaboration with our foreign law enforcement partners all, standing shoulder to shoulder, pursuing the same goals, seeking to remediate victims and prevent LockBit from continuing its nefarious activities, it was these partnerships that were essential to today’s success.

I cannot go on without mentioning some of the other international partners who contributed to this effort including South West Regional Organized Crime Unit in the U.K., Metropolitan Police Service in the U.K., Europol, Gendarmerie-C3N in France, the State Criminal Police Office L-K-A and Federal Criminal Police Office in Germany, Fedpol and Zurich Cantonal Police in Switzerland, the National Police Agency in Japan, the Australian Federal Police in Australia, the Swedish Police Authority in Sweden, the National Bureau of Investigation in Finland, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada, and the National Police in the Netherlands.

This coordinated disruption of LockBit’s networks illustrates the power of collaboration between the FBI and our international partners.

The FBI’s strategy to combat ransomware leverages both our law enforcement and intelligence authorities to go after the whole cybercrime ecosystem by targeting the key services, namely the actors, their finances, their communications, their malware, and their supporting infrastructure.

And since 2021, that’s exactly how we’ve targeted the LockBit ransomware.

Our access to LockBit’s infrastructure was no accident.

Now, as we move to the next phase of the investigation, we’ve worked with our international partners to seize the infrastructure used by these criminal actors including nearly 11,000 domains and servers located all over the globe—hindering LockBit’s ability to sting again.

Through this operation, we have access to nearly 1,000 potential decryption capabilities, and the FBI, NCA, and Europol will be conducting victim engagement with over 1,600 known US victims.

I’m here today to ask those US victims and private sector partners who have been a victim of a LockBit ransomware attack to please go to our IC3 website to complete a questionnaire to see if the FBI can provide you with decryption capabilities found during this infrastructure disruption.

One example of our success helping victims occurred in October of 2023.

A Boeing distribution business, Boeing Distribution Inc. (BDI), was the victim of a LockBit ransomware attack.

Boeing immediately engaged the FBI, which provided timely coordination and information sharing that was instrumental to BDI’s investigation and recovery.

Today’s lesson for businesses large and small, hospitals and police departments, and all the other many victims of ransomware is this:

Reach out to your local FBI field office today and introduce yourselves, so you know who to call if you become the victim of a cyberattack. If you are a victim of LockBit, please reach out to your local FBI office or fill out the form on lockbitvictims.ic3.gov. The FBI is in possession of nearly 1,000 decryption keys, which we intend to provide to victims.

We’re ready to help you build a crisis response plan, so when an intruder does come knocking, you’ll be prepared.

And, like the LockBit victims here, when you talk to us in advance—as so many others have—you’ll know how we operate: quickly and quietly, giving you the assistance, intelligence, and technical information you want and need.

When victims report attacks to us, we can help them—and others, too.

Today’s announcement is only the beginning.

We’ll continue gathering evidence, building out our map of LockBit developers, administrators, and affiliates, and using that knowledge to drive arrests, seizures, and other operations, whether by the FBI or our partners here and abroad.

While this is, yes, a fight to protect our country, our citizens, and our national security, make no mistake—the fight for cybersecurity spans the globe. But the FBI’s presence and partnerships do, too.

So, a reminder to cybercriminals: No matter where you are, and no matter how much you try to twist and turn to cover your tracks—your infrastructure, your criminal associates, your money, and your liberty are all at risk. And there will be consequences.

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News

It’s an honor to join all of you here today.

For the past decade, this conference has given leaders from around the world and throughout industry, academia, and government the chance not just to talk about some of the biggest challenges we face—in other words, to share the bad news about the threats we’re all seeing—but also to discuss the solutions we’ve identified for overcoming those threats—to share the good news about our way forward.

So, I’m going to do a little of both and take you through what we at the FBI are seeing—both the good and the bad. And because a speaker should always be kind to his audience, I’m going to start with the good news.
 
What Success Looks Like 
As everyone in this room knows, today’s threat environment is constantly evolving—and it’s more severe and more complex than ever before. That’s especially true when it comes to the battles being waged in cyberspace. But the good news is, we’ve learned what success looks like—because we’ve lived it, together.

For the past several years, the Bureau has been laser-focused on what I consider one of our most valuable tools, and the core of our cyber strategy, leading joint, sequenced operations, conducted with our partners—many of whom are in this room today—and designed to maximize impact on our adversaries.

And I want to take a moment to reflect on and highlight some of those successes.   

I’m talking about things like Operation Medusa, a joint, sequenced operation that included using sophisticated technical means to force Snake—the Russian FSB’s most sophisticated malware—to effectively cannibalize itself. We took down Snake in over 50 countries with the help of our U.S. and more than half a dozen foreign partners.

Another example: the year-and-a-half-long campaign we waged—with our European partners—to hack the hackers of Hive, ransomware group targeting hospitals, schools, and emergency services, whose servers and websites we seized and shut down—and whose victims we saved from tens of millions in ransom payments.

Or how about the joint, sequenced operation that dismantled Genesis Market? Where working with our law enforcement counterparts in a dozen nations, we accomplished our biggest takedown ever of criminals dealing in stolen digital credentials. 

And just this morning, we announced yet another success, Operation Dying Ember, where working with our U.S.—and, again, worldwide law enforcement partners—we ran a court-authorized technical operation to kick the Russian GRU off well over a thousand home and small business routers, and lock the door behind them, killing the GRU’s access to a botnet it was piggybacking to run cyber operations against countries around the world, including America and its allies in Europe.

With these operations, and many more like them, we’ve set our sights on all the elements that we know from experience make criminal organizations tick: their people—a term we define broadly to include not just ransomware administrators and affiliates, but their facilitators, like bulletproof hosters and money launderers; their infrastructure; their servers, botnets, etc.; and their money, the cryptocurrency wallets they use to stash their ill-gotten gains, hire associates, and lease infrastructure.

Because we don’t just want to hit them—we want to hit them everywhere it hurts, and put them down, hard.
 
Importance of Global Partnerships 
Now, you might have noticed a common theme as I rattled off those successes, and that’s how heavily we rely on our partners—both at home and overseas—to get the job done. Because as everyone here knows, none of us can go it alone.

The bad guys aren’t constrained by international borders, so we shouldn’t be, either.  

At the Bureau, we’ve been doubling down in particular on our work with the private sector, in their capacity as victims of cyberattacks, of course, because the mission of the FBI always has been—and always will be—victim-centric—but also as integral partners, who can share valuable information about threats and trends, and, increasingly, join in our operations themselves.

Of course, our closest partners remain our intelligence and law enforcement colleagues in the U.S. and abroad. And I firmly believe one of the things that gives us a competitive advantage over our adversaries—authoritarians, criminals, and the toxic blend of the two—is that in those agencies we have real partners, partners who collaborate, not because they have to, but because they want to, out of shared values and a shared commitment to the rule of law.

To keep those partnerships strong, the FBI relies on our global presence.

Our broad, international footprint includes nearly a hundred satellite offices, providing coverage for more than 180 countries, territories, and islands around the world. And within many of those offices, our dedicated and quickly-expanding cadre of cyber assistant legal attachés work side-by-side with their host-nation counterparts to combat cyber threats—and I mean side-by-side literally. Often at desks in our partners’ space, right next to them, our Cyber Action Team and a host of experts also stand ready to deploy to critical cyber incidents at a moment’s notice as they did not long ago when they helped a NATO ally determine a cyberattack targeting critical public infrastructure had originated in Iran.

When you put all of that together, you’ll find we’ve got a pretty formidable arsenal that arms our partnerships and enables the joint, sequenced operations that represent success across the world.
 
The China Threat  
So, that’s the good news—and I’d love to be able to stop there and tell you I’ve only got good news to share. But that’s not really what people expect when they invite the FBI Director to speak—and I’d hate to disappoint you all today.

So, let’s get to the bad news.

The bad news is that while all of us have gotten a lot better at working together to combat the cyber threat, our adversaries have also been improving exponentially—and the world has become more dangerous than ever.

It won’t surprise any of you to hear that chief among those adversaries is the Chinese government, which has continued to attack the economic security, national security, and sovereignty of rule-of-law nations worldwide. The cyber threat posed by the Chinese government is massive. China’s hacking program is larger than that of every other major nation, combined. And that size advantage is only magnified because the PRC uses AI—built in large part on stolen innovation and stolen data—to improve its hacking operations, including to steal yet more AI tech and data.

But the PRC cyber threat is made even more harmful by the way the Chinese government combines cyber means with traditional espionage and economic espionage, foreign malign influence, election interference, and transnational repression. In other words, the CCP is throwing its whole government at undermining the security of the rule-of-law world. It’s hitting us indiscriminately, like in the so-called “Hafnium” Microsoft Exchange hack, where the PRC compromised managed service providers, hitting tens of thousands of victims. 

And not just in the United States, but in countries all over the world.

You’ll note a theme here, in the tools Beijing uses, and who it uses them against China doesn’t partner—it bullies and it bullies targets at every level—from individuals, to businesses and organizations, to governments. The PRC uses cyber as one of its means to that end.

Your country won’t toe Beijing’s line, and insists on standing up for freedom of association and expression, or for your partners?   

You might just find illegal PRC police stations in your territory, or MSS officers in China threatening your free-thinking students’ grandparents back home. You might find your companies harassed and hacked, targeted by a web of corporate CCP proxies. You might also find PRC hackers lurking in your power stations, your phone companies, etc., poised to take them down when they decide you stepped too far out of line, and that hurting your civilian population suits the CCP. And that targeting of our critical infrastructure is something I want to take a minute to address.

It’s certainly not anything new. 

In fact, China-sponsored hackers pre-positioned for potential cyberattacks against U.S. oil and natural gas companies way back in 2011. But these days, it’s reached something closer to a fever pitch. What we’re seeing now, is China’s increasing buildout of offensive weapons within our critical infrastructure, poised to attack whenever Beijing decides the time is right.

Take, for instance, persistent PRC access the U.S. found in our critical telecommunications, energy, water, and other infrastructure. China-sponsored hackers known as Volt Typhoon were hiding inside our networks, lying in wait for the moment China might choose to use their access to hurt American civilians. And while many of you may have seen the Volt Typhoon story as one about the PRC targeting the United States, in fact their targets spanned the globe—which shouldn’t be surprising, because in hack after hack, for years, we’ve seen the PRC hitting our partners around the world.
 
Now working with our partners, the FBI was able to shut down Volt Typhoon’s access through yet another one of those joint, technical operations we talked about a few minutes ago.

But there’s a lot more PRC cyber threat—in a lot more places—out there. And we’re only going to be able to battle back effectively if we do it together. Of course by “we,” I’m referring to rule-of-law nations united against criminality and abuse. I know there are some representatives of the CCP walking around town. But I don’t mind them knowing we’re onto them.
 
Other Cyber Threats 
Of course, everyone here is well aware China is not the only adversary we’re up against.

Russia, Iran, and North Korea are also determined to use cyber means to take aim at things we all hold sacred—our freedoms, prosperity, and democratic norms.

Take for instance, the 2022 cyberattack by an Iranian-sponsored group on a children’s hospital in the United States, one that showed a callous—and, frankly, despicable—disregard for the safety of the most vulnerable among us.

Or consider Russia’s continued targeting of critical infrastructure—including underwater cables and industrial control systems both in the United States and around the world. For instance, since its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, we’ve seen Russia conducting reconnaissance on the U.S. energy sector. And that’s a particularly worrisome trend because we know that once access is established, a hacker can switch from information gathering to attack—quickly and without notice.

After all, Russia has made murder, rape, and mayhem its stock in trade.

So, no one should question its continuing willingness to launch destructive cyberattacks before and during military conflict.
 
Conclusion  
There’s no doubt we’re up against daunting threats, and adversaries growing more sophisticated and dangerous every day. 

That’s the bad news.

But everyone in this room—across government, academia, and the private sector—has the opportunity to stand together. And we’ve proven what we can accomplish together when we do.

That’s the good news.

We can make joint use of our collective expertise, capabilities, and authorities. And we should remember and capitalize on what sets us apart from our adversaries—our mutual trust, our shared values, and our desire to work together to keep people safe. That is how we’re going to stay ahead of the cyber threat. And at the FBI, we’re honored to stand alongside you in this fight.

Thank you. 

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News

It’s an honor to join all of you here today.

For the past decade, this conference has given leaders from around the world and throughout industry, academia, and government the chance not just to talk about some of the biggest challenges we face—in other words, to share the bad news about the threats we’re all seeing—but also to discuss the solutions we’ve identified for overcoming those threats—to share the good news about our way forward.

So, I’m going to do a little of both and take you through what we at the FBI are seeing—both the good and the bad. And because a speaker should always be kind to his audience, I’m going to start with the good news.
 
What Success Looks Like 
As everyone in this room knows, today’s threat environment is constantly evolving—and it’s more severe and more complex than ever before. That’s especially true when it comes to the battles being waged in cyberspace. But the good news is, we’ve learned what success looks like—because we’ve lived it, together.

For the past several years, the Bureau has been laser-focused on what I consider one of our most valuable tools, and the core of our cyber strategy, leading joint, sequenced operations, conducted with our partners—many of whom are in this room today—and designed to maximize impact on our adversaries.

And I want to take a moment to reflect on and highlight some of those successes.   

I’m talking about things like Operation Medusa, a joint, sequenced operation that included using sophisticated technical means to force Snake—the Russian FSB’s most sophisticated malware—to effectively cannibalize itself. We took down Snake in over 50 countries with the help of our U.S. and more than half a dozen foreign partners.

Another example: the year-and-a-half-long campaign we waged—with our European partners—to hack the hackers of Hive, ransomware group targeting hospitals, schools, and emergency services, whose servers and websites we seized and shut down—and whose victims we saved from tens of millions in ransom payments.

Or how about the joint, sequenced operation that dismantled Genesis Market? Where working with our law enforcement counterparts in a dozen nations, we accomplished our biggest takedown ever of criminals dealing in stolen digital credentials. 

And just this morning, we announced yet another success, Operation Dying Ember, where working with our U.S.—and, again, worldwide law enforcement partners—we ran a court-authorized technical operation to kick the Russian GRU off well over a thousand home and small business routers, and lock the door behind them, killing the GRU’s access to a botnet it was piggybacking to run cyber operations against countries around the world, including America and its allies in Europe.

With these operations, and many more like them, we’ve set our sights on all the elements that we know from experience make criminal organizations tick: their people—a term we define broadly to include not just ransomware administrators and affiliates, but their facilitators, like bulletproof hosters and money launderers; their infrastructure; their servers, botnets, etc.; and their money, the cryptocurrency wallets they use to stash their ill-gotten gains, hire associates, and lease infrastructure.

Because we don’t just want to hit them—we want to hit them everywhere it hurts, and put them down, hard.
 
Importance of Global Partnerships 
Now, you might have noticed a common theme as I rattled off those successes, and that’s how heavily we rely on our partners—both at home and overseas—to get the job done. Because as everyone here knows, none of us can go it alone.

The bad guys aren’t constrained by international borders, so we shouldn’t be, either.  

At the Bureau, we’ve been doubling down in particular on our work with the private sector, in their capacity as victims of cyberattacks, of course, because the mission of the FBI always has been—and always will be—victim-centric—but also as integral partners, who can share valuable information about threats and trends, and, increasingly, join in our operations themselves.

Of course, our closest partners remain our intelligence and law enforcement colleagues in the U.S. and abroad. And I firmly believe one of the things that gives us a competitive advantage over our adversaries—authoritarians, criminals, and the toxic blend of the two—is that in those agencies we have real partners, partners who collaborate, not because they have to, but because they want to, out of shared values and a shared commitment to the rule of law.

To keep those partnerships strong, the FBI relies on our global presence.

Our broad, international footprint includes nearly a hundred satellite offices, providing coverage for more than 180 countries, territories, and islands around the world. And within many of those offices, our dedicated and quickly-expanding cadre of cyber assistant legal attachés work side-by-side with their host-nation counterparts to combat cyber threats—and I mean side-by-side literally. Often at desks in our partners’ space, right next to them, our Cyber Action Team and a host of experts also stand ready to deploy to critical cyber incidents at a moment’s notice as they did not long ago when they helped a NATO ally determine a cyberattack targeting critical public infrastructure had originated in Iran.

When you put all of that together, you’ll find we’ve got a pretty formidable arsenal that arms our partnerships and enables the joint, sequenced operations that represent success across the world.
 
The China Threat  
So, that’s the good news—and I’d love to be able to stop there and tell you I’ve only got good news to share. But that’s not really what people expect when they invite the FBI Director to speak—and I’d hate to disappoint you all today.

So, let’s get to the bad news.

The bad news is that while all of us have gotten a lot better at working together to combat the cyber threat, our adversaries have also been improving exponentially—and the world has become more dangerous than ever.

It won’t surprise any of you to hear that chief among those adversaries is the Chinese government, which has continued to attack the economic security, national security, and sovereignty of rule-of-law nations worldwide. The cyber threat posed by the Chinese government is massive. China’s hacking program is larger than that of every other major nation, combined. And that size advantage is only magnified because the PRC uses AI—built in large part on stolen innovation and stolen data—to improve its hacking operations, including to steal yet more AI tech and data.

But the PRC cyber threat is made even more harmful by the way the Chinese government combines cyber means with traditional espionage and economic espionage, foreign malign influence, election interference, and transnational repression. In other words, the CCP is throwing its whole government at undermining the security of the rule-of-law world. It’s hitting us indiscriminately, like in the so-called “Hafnium” Microsoft Exchange hack, where the PRC compromised managed service providers, hitting tens of thousands of victims. 

And not just in the United States, but in countries all over the world.

You’ll note a theme here, in the tools Beijing uses, and who it uses them against China doesn’t partner—it bullies and it bullies targets at every level—from individuals, to businesses and organizations, to governments. The PRC uses cyber as one of its means to that end.

Your country won’t toe Beijing’s line, and insists on standing up for freedom of association and expression, or for your partners?   

You might just find illegal PRC police stations in your territory, or MSS officers in China threatening your free-thinking students’ grandparents back home. You might find your companies harassed and hacked, targeted by a web of corporate CCP proxies. You might also find PRC hackers lurking in your power stations, your phone companies, etc., poised to take them down when they decide you stepped too far out of line, and that hurting your civilian population suits the CCP. And that targeting of our critical infrastructure is something I want to take a minute to address.

It’s certainly not anything new. 

In fact, China-sponsored hackers pre-positioned for potential cyberattacks against U.S. oil and natural gas companies way back in 2011. But these days, it’s reached something closer to a fever pitch. What we’re seeing now, is China’s increasing buildout of offensive weapons within our critical infrastructure, poised to attack whenever Beijing decides the time is right.

Take, for instance, persistent PRC access the U.S. found in our critical telecommunications, energy, water, and other infrastructure. China-sponsored hackers known as Volt Typhoon were hiding inside our networks, lying in wait for the moment China might choose to use their access to hurt American civilians. And while many of you may have seen the Volt Typhoon story as one about the PRC targeting the United States, in fact their targets spanned the globe—which shouldn’t be surprising, because in hack after hack, for years, we’ve seen the PRC hitting our partners around the world.
 
Now working with our partners, the FBI was able to shut down Volt Typhoon’s access through yet another one of those joint, technical operations we talked about a few minutes ago.

But there’s a lot more PRC cyber threat—in a lot more places—out there. And we’re only going to be able to battle back effectively if we do it together. Of course by “we,” I’m referring to rule-of-law nations united against criminality and abuse. I know there are some representatives of the CCP walking around town. But I don’t mind them knowing we’re onto them.
 
Other Cyber Threats 
Of course, everyone here is well aware China is not the only adversary we’re up against.

Russia, Iran, and North Korea are also determined to use cyber means to take aim at things we all hold sacred—our freedoms, prosperity, and democratic norms.

Take for instance, the 2022 cyberattack by an Iranian-sponsored group on a children’s hospital in the United States, one that showed a callous—and, frankly, despicable—disregard for the safety of the most vulnerable among us.

Or consider Russia’s continued targeting of critical infrastructure—including underwater cables and industrial control systems both in the United States and around the world. For instance, since its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, we’ve seen Russia conducting reconnaissance on the U.S. energy sector. And that’s a particularly worrisome trend because we know that once access is established, a hacker can switch from information gathering to attack—quickly and without notice.

After all, Russia has made murder, rape, and mayhem its stock in trade.

So, no one should question its continuing willingness to launch destructive cyberattacks before and during military conflict.
 
Conclusion  
There’s no doubt we’re up against daunting threats, and adversaries growing more sophisticated and dangerous every day. 

That’s the bad news.

But everyone in this room—across government, academia, and the private sector—has the opportunity to stand together. And we’ve proven what we can accomplish together when we do.

That’s the good news.

We can make joint use of our collective expertise, capabilities, and authorities. And we should remember and capitalize on what sets us apart from our adversaries—our mutual trust, our shared values, and our desire to work together to keep people safe. That is how we’re going to stay ahead of the cyber threat. And at the FBI, we’re honored to stand alongside you in this fight.

Thank you.