WASHINGTON — Gordon M. Snow, a Detroit native, gets a bump up, going from deputy assistant director of the agency’s Cyber Division to assistant director of the division, which protects U.S. from cyber attacks and high tech crimes.

“The FBI considers the cyber threat against our nation to be one of the greatest concerns of the 21st century,” FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said in a statement. “Protecting the United States against cyber crimes is one of the FBI’s highest priorities and, in fact, is the FBI’s highest criminal priority. Gordon’s broad range of investigative and leadership experience will serve the Cyber Division well as they carry out this mission.”

Snow started as an agent in 1992 Huntsville, Ala., where he investigated violent crime, drug, civil rights, public corruption, and white-collar crime.

In April 1996, he jointed the Critical Incident Response Group as a member of the Hostage Rescue Team. His assignments included “assessment, protection, and investigative support missions after the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, and the embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya.,” the FBI said.

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Unless we want to see these types of attacks become even more popular, state and federal authorities  need to beef up their cyber defenses – and fast.

By Brian Krebs
Washington Post
Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site’s homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.

Wikileaks reports that the Web site for the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program was defaced last week with a message claiming that the database of prescriptions had been bundled into an encrypted, password-protected file.

Wikileaks has published a copy of the ransom note left in place of the PMP home page, a message that claims the state of Virginia would need to pay the demand in order to gain access to a password needed to unlock those records:

“I have your [expletive] In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password.”

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