Stefan Mileschin

The Untouchables have said that they are improving their hours when it comes to fighting hackers.

In a statement the FBI said it is "hunting hackers 24/7". The statement is a surprise, because many US citizens assumed that hunting hackers was something the FBI assigned the work experience person to do. It is not clear how many hours they spent looking for hackers before.

According to Tech Report, the agency announced that it has been working on an initiative for the past year.

The cunning plan was to "uncover and investigate web-based intrusion attacks and develop a cadre of specially trained computer scientists able to extract hackers' digital signatures from mountains of malicious code".

Apparently the FBI is bringing in experts from financial, business, transportation, and other critical infrastructures. It has also hired specialists to work at its Cyber Division's Cyber Watch command.

FBI investigators can now send their findings to a centre, which will be open 24/7. The job of the centre will be to look for patterns in reported cases.

The FBI sees its job as tackling cyber intrusions and it is working with its own Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence divisions.

Dubbed the "National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force" (NCIJTF), information will be shared with other law enforcement agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and the National Security Agency.

Tech Report spoke to Special Agent Richard McFeely, executive assistant director of the Bureau's Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch, who said that the NCIJTF tries to find the "attribution piece" of a cyber attack.

The attribution piece is spook talk for the person who is conducting the attack or the exploitation and their motive. The FBI wants to do all the necessary analysis to determine who is at the other end of the keyboard perpetrating these actions.

We guess it does not want to think that it is dealing with a full on terrorist attack, only to find some luckless Brit looking for aliens. But the FBI says that its job to make sure that businesses' and the nation's secrets don't fall into the hands of adversaries.

http://news.techeye.net/security/fbi...-catch-hackers