Cyberattacks, Prevention, and Countermeasures

Imagine Sherlock Holmes meets James Bond in crime fighting, FBI Director Christopher Wray said at Fordham University in July 2019, “We’ve got technically trained personnel—with cutting-edge tools and skills you might never have imagined seeing outside of a James Bond movie—covering roughly 400 offices around the country” (1). For example, in August 2023, the FBI hacked into Qakbot—a long-running botnet for rent to cybercriminals—and removed malicious programs from more than 700,000 infected computers around the world (2). For another example, in the wake of the September 2023 cyberattack on MGM Resorts in Las Vegas, the FBI released a decryption tool to help victims to unlock and recover their computer systems from ransomware (3).