Report: FBI struggling to identify cyber criminals

As a growing number of companies, government agencies and other organizations migrate to the cloud, cloud computing security management has received increasing attention.

According to a recent Fierce Government IT report, some cloud computing security experts believe that any network connected to the internet requires additional data protection attention, as cyber criminals develop new means of attacking IT infrastructure.

What's more, it is critical for security experts to keep up with the most advanced attack techniques, because of the trickle-down effect.

Gordon Snow, assistant director of the FBI's cyber security division, told Fierce Government IT that, "although likely only advanced threat actors are currently capable of employing these techniques, as we have seen with other malicious software tools, these capabilities will eventually be within reach of all threat actors."

One particular challenge the FBI has been working on in recent times is identifying the source of cyber attacks. According to the report, it is often difficult to determine whether a particular, large-scale attack originated in a criminal enterprise or a nation state's government apparatus.

Despite the difficulties, Snow said, there have been some successes in identifying the sources of cyber crime. Many security breaches have been discovered to have originated in Eastern Europe and Russia, according to Snow.

Paul Martinez, deputy special agent for the U.S. Secret Service's cyber crime criminal investigation division told Fierce Government IT that the Secret Service currently has 22 offices overseas, as well as Electronic Cybercrime Task Forces, located in London and Rome.

In addition to these, the agency manages to have a presence in other areas as well. "In the countries where we don't have an office we take a regional approach, where we have an agent specifically assigned to those countries," Martinez said.

According to Martinez, the Secret Service has been successful in many cases. In the last two years, the agency contributed to the arrest of more than 40 criminals who were "responsible for the largest network intrusion cases ever prosecured in the United States," he said.

For some businesses, espionage, large-scale sabotage and international cyber attacks seem unlikely. Nevertheless, as cloud computing leads to the consolidation of many organizations' IT infrastructure, applications and data in large data centers belonging to centralized cloud vendors, companies may do well to invest time and resources in cloud computing security management.

Some companies view cloud computing security as the final obstacle to cloud adoption, given the technology's many benefits. According to a recent Smart Business report, cloud computing can help a company save as much as 40 percent on operating costs.