The FBI wants to double the number of its cyber G-men in the next two years, sending e-crime squads to all its nationwide field offices to fight computer crime and terrorism.
Deputy Director Thomas Pickard says the FBI also wants to beef up the number of investigators at the National Infrastructure Protection Center at the bureau's Washington headquarters, APBNews says. "You're going to see eventually, I would say, 56 NIPC-like squads out there in all our offices," he tells the crime news service.
This comes in the wake of federal investigators trying to find the root of spam-bomb denial-of-service attacks that froze some of the Internet's most prominent sites. The FBI says it's making strong progress in the investigation, but the painstaking process of information gathering, while time consuming, is vital to making the case against whomever is finally brought to account for those attacks, the bureau says.
Other FBI officials, however, have expressed alarm in recent weeks at the lack of new NPIC funding in the final Clinton Administration budget proposal. Sixteen NPIC-directed cybercrime groups now work around the U.S.
Pickard, however, believes FBI cybercrime probers will fan out into eight- or ten-person groups around the U.S. to hunt cyberfraud, hacking, espionage, and terrorism. "There's no better training you can get than working on the most complex cases here than going out to the field offices and helping with that," he tells APBNews.
