FBI working to ‘burn down’ cyber criminals’ infrastructure

To thwart increasingly dangerous cyber criminals, law enforcement agents are working to “burn down their infrastructure” and take out the tools that allow them to carry out their devastating attacks, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday.

Unsophisticated cyber criminals now have the power to paralyze entire hospitals, businesses and police departments, Wray said during a conference on cybersecurity at Boston College. The ever-changing threat has forced law enforcement to get creative and target the dark web sites and other tools at hackers’ disposal, he said.

“The reality is we are long past the days where we can fight this threat just one by one, one bad guy at a time … one victim company at a time. We’ve got to figure out ways to tackle the cyber threat as a whole,” Wray told the crowd of FBI agents, university officials and others on the Chestnut Hill campus. The U.S. saw a nearly 40 percent increase in ransomware attacks between 2018 and 2019, said Joseph Bonavolonta, the head of the FBI’s office in Boston. There was an even more dramatic uptick in such attacks in just the four states — Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island and New Hampshire — that the Boston office covers, he said.