We're Letting Them Win
"Ghosts in the Browser," by Ryan Blitstein of the Mercury News, provides a disturbing look at America's inept attempts to counter the growth of cybercrime. While sophisticated criminal organizations such as Rock Phish in Russia steal over $100 million a year from the world's largest banks, and individual Americans lose at least $200 million a year to online fraud, businesses and surfers ignore basic security measures. Even worse, the FBI has built up a six-month backlog for forensic examinations:
Richard D.G. Cox saw the price of delay over the summer, when he thought he had found evidence to help take down one of the Internet underground's most powerful criminal groups.
Cox and his team at the Spamhaus Project, a European non-profit that tracks cybercriminal gangs, identified a computer serving as one of the technical nerve centers of the Storm Worm group - an organization that had turned hundreds of thousands of computers into remote-controlled zombies by depositing malicious software and absorbing them into a botnet, then rented it out to spammers.
FBI agents had earlier made clear to Cox that information about Storm was urgent. So he contacted the bureau, thinking the discovery of the server - just driving distance from federal cyber headquarters - provided a rare opportunity.
But weeks passed with no response. In mid-October, Cox asked an FBI agent what had happened. The agent said the bureau decided not to pursue the lead, but offered no explanation.
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http://www.siliconvalley.com/ghostsinthebrowser