The FBI is asking Congress to add $70.5 million to its budget so it can hire more data analysts and expand its cybersecurity capacity in the face of growing threats from hackers supported by rogue nation-states.
Derek B. Johnson reports on the FBI’s plan to beef up its cybersecurity workforce in this article from FCW:
A range of growing threats that require combatting nation-state hackers and dismantling botnets as well as fighting against ransomware and distributed denial-of-service attacks is straining the organization’s technical resources.
On top of that, the FBI’s role assisting state and local governments and private-sector companies — who often face the same threats but have a fraction of the resources the federal government brings to bear — has steadily grown as policymakers gain greater appreciation of how successful cyberattacks can have cascading consequences across different sectors and industries.
“Make no mistake, it is a significant challenge, and it exceeds the bandwidth that we have at the moment,” Wray told the House Appropriations subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies.
The bureau is requesting an additional $70.5 million to enhance information-sharing abilities and augment its current cyber tools and capacities, as well as add 33 positions. That’s on top of its current funding of $452 million in salaries and expenses on 1,981 employees for cyber-related investigations, according to its latest budget request.
Wray said 25 new positions would be primarily dedicated to data analysis, a growing need as criminal investigations in nearly every arena increasingly come with significant cyber or digital evidence components. The sheer amount of data the bureau must ingest, process and analyze has greatly accelerated over the past few years, and Wray indicated those trends will only continue upward in the future.
