The FBI came to Syracuse

On Wednesday, Steve Vizyary of the FBI came to our IST 323 lab to discuss cyber security and hackers. Vizyary is based out of New York and specializes in tracking Jihads and their use of the internet. Here  are some of the main points I picked up on.

1. Soon hacking will be the number 1 threat to the country, over terrorism. This idea came from a quote from Vizyary's former director. But it's finally happening. Hacking is growing and growing. Soon hacking will be the form of terrorism. Countries will be hacking each other in order to try and get the upper hand.

2. A level 2 hacker is usually somebody searching for financial information. Sure, that's not too strange. But I found it strange that the 3 leading countries for this type of hacking are Russia, China, and Iran. These are 3 of the stronger economies in the world yet they are still trying to steal financial information. I find it peculiar. It's probably more mob/Mafia type of people doing these attacks. I'm not accusing any country of financial fraud or some type of crime but it does seem fishy.

3. One in eight spam messages are clicked on. ONE IN EIGHT! I can't believe that. It was harder for Shaq to shoot a free throw then for a hacker to catch somebody with a spam attack. I wouldn't think in 2013 that the number would be so high. I could maybe understand one in twenty. But one in eight?! Come on.

4. Hacktivists are the largest group of hackers around, but they are not that much of a threat. Mainly because these hackers are not that experienced, and some like to do it just for fun (like the Joker in Batman). But I see a lot of potential in Hacktivist if they were more organized and skilled. They could really cause major problems in computer security world wide.

5. The FBI's "arch-nemisis" is Industrial Espionage. I find the idea of it really cool. It's basically like Inception only with computers. Some hackers will break in and then patch the area so nobody can get in and then they can hide in the system they hacked.

Overal the talk today was pretty interesting. We also learned that malware is still the leading type of attack.

That's all for now.

--Chris