Good morning Senator Whitehouse. I thank you for holding this hearing today, and I look forward to discussing the progress the FBI has made on campaigns to disrupt and disable significant botnets.
As you well know, we face cyber threats from state-sponsored hackers, hackers for hire, organized cyber syndicates, and terrorists. They seek our state secrets, our trade secrets, our technology, and our ideas – things of incredible value to all of us. They may seek to strike our critical infrastructure and our economy. The threat is so dire that cyber security has topped the Director of National Intelligence list of global threats for the second consecutive year.
Cyber criminal threats post very real risks to the economic security and privacy of the United States and its citizens. The use of botnets is on the rise. Industry experts estimate that botnets attacks have resulted in the overall loss of millions of dollars from financial institutions and other major U.S. businesses. They also affect universities, hospitals, defense contractors, government, and even private citizens.The “weapons” of a cyber criminal are tools, like botnets, which are created with malicious software that is readily available for purchase on the Internet. Criminals distribute malicious software, also known as malware, that can turn a computer into a “bot.” When this occurs, a computer can perform automated tasks over the Internet, without any irection from its rightful user. A network of these infected computers—numbering in the hundreds of thousands or even millions—is called a botnet (robot network), and each computer becomes connected to a command-and-control server operated by the criminal.
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