Gordon Snow, assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, said his organization’s mission is to go after and identify threats and, more importantly, victims of cyber intrusions. His G-men don’t just sit back and wait for threats to emerge. “I’m not a defender, I don’t defend my network,” he told attendees of AFA’s first-ever CyberFutures Conference on Thursday near Washington, D.C. He continued, “What I do is threat pursuit.” Specifically, since a Presidential mandate in 2008, the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force has been charged with carrying out “cyber threat identification,” or CTI, for the US government. That mission entails determining the plans and intentions of certain persons, groups, or entities and finding out what can be done to neutralize a threat. The task force includes 18 intelligence agencies and law enforcement entities, working side by side to identify key actors and efforts to penetrate and corrupt networks. The task force also works to share all information related to domestic cyber threat investigations across title authorities and agencies, Snow said.
The U.S. sent Air Force F-16s over central Syria in a show of force following the Dec. 13 killing of two U.S. Army Soldiers and one American civilian interpreter by a gunman linked to the Islamic State group.
