RSA Conference 2012: Need for collaboration, information sharing and best technology addressed by FBI

The theme of needing to collaborate to fulfill and defeat cyber crime has continued.

Speaking on the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Robert S. Mueller III, director on the FBI and a former US attorney, claimed that "technology is moving so rapidly that it's difficult to take care of" and called on private and public sectors to interact to share information.

In his keynote address, Mueller said that is imperative that we interact to guard our intellectual property, protect our infrastructure and protect our economy as cyber criminals use the web to grow their businesses and fix with like-minded individuals.

Likening cyber crime to terrorism, he said that extremists are using cyberspace to conduct operations. “To date terrorists haven't used the web to launch an entire-scale cyber attack, but we can't underestimate their intent. In a single hacker recruiting video, a terrorist proclaims that cyber warfare would be the warfare of the longer term,” he said.

“We are losing money, ideas and innovation, and as citizens we're increasingly prone to losing information as together we must give you the option to prevent the bleeding.”

He said that the FBI has built networks, and he pointed to the takedown of botnets last year. But he admitted that the FBI cannot confront cyber crime by itself, as with each passing day "the necessity for a real collaborative approach with timely information sharing becomes more pressing".

He said: “We must continue to push forward together. Terrorism does remainside the FBI's top priority, but in the not-too-distant future, we anticipate that the cyber threat will pose the number-one threat to our country, and we have to take lessons learned from fighting terrorism and apply them to cyber crime. We're ensuring agents have skills to function during this environment.”

He said that 63 agents was educated in cyber-crime skills and international partnerships has been developed.

Following from the decision by RSA president Art Coviello for more collaboration, Mueller said that real-time information sharing is significant and knowledge "can and will be shared" between the personal and public sectors.

“Maintaining a code of silence won't serve us ultimately, it isn't an issue of if but if or how often. There are two forms of companies: those who might be hacked and those who had been hacked and should be hacked again,” he said.

“We must limit the information which might be gleaned from such compromise, we must segregate data from routine information and we must incorporate layers of detection for critical information.

“We cannot minimise vulnerabilities and cope with the effects, collectively we must use systems to catch threat actors instead of just withstand them.”