The fact that state actors are forced to use criminal, mercenary hackers in their cyber espionage and attack campaigns is a silver lining to law enforcement looking to identify and catch the perpetrators, according to Adam Hickey, deputy assistant attorney general for national asset protection at the Department of Justice. […]

The FBI announced the release of its Most Wanted application, which provides citizens with pictures and information about investigations into wanted fugitives, missing persons, crime suspects, deceased victims, and others. […]

In coordination with Europol’s European Cyber Crime Centre, the FBI conducted a series of interviews and arrests Dec. 5-9 aimed at reducing the number of young people acting as Distributed Denial of Service-for-hire hackers. […]

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination for United States attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., could have an impact on government surveillance power because of his full-fledged support of the National Security Agency’s spying authorities. […]

Police departments across the country that received Federal grants for body worn cameras are concerned about sharing information with the agencies responsible for this funding. Some police departments have gone so far to as to say they would not share body camera footage unless Federal agencies compelled them. […]

An effort to block or delay changes to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure failed to pass the Senate floor, causing the changes to the rule to go into effect on Dec. 1. The changes will allow law enforcement to obtain warrants to search computers in an unknown location and to search any device that the hacker has broken into, potentially granting access to multiple privately owned computers with one warrant. […]

The Federal government’s policy on data collection and management could determine whether President-elect Donald Trump will be able to carry out his administration goal of finding and deporting illegal immigrants who’ve been convicted of crimes. […]

In order to educate law enforcement officials on how to deal with digital evidence and cyber-based crimes, the FBI has created the Cyber Investigator Certification Program, a project that, in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University, aims to address the concerns of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) over a lack of affordable cyber training options for officers. […]

The Department of Justice appealed the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in favor of Microsoft that said American service providers are not required to honor warrants seeking data outside the United States. In this case, which was decided in July, the data the DOJ was asking for belonged to a non-U.S. citizen and was stored in a data center in Ireland. […]

Though the Federal government has certainly experienced ransomware attacks, experts speaking at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association Cybersecurity Summit on Tuesday explained that it is not the primary target for ransomware hackers. […]

The FBI is letting everyday citizens get in on bank robbery investigations with its Bank Robbers mobile app, which provides users with location-based information on unsolved bank robberies. […]

A Government Accountability Office study uncovered a huge discrepancy in Federal reporting on sexual violence because the agencies that collect the data don’t record or label incidents the same way. According to data collection efforts from four Federal agencies, between 244,190 and 1,929,000 rapes or sexual assaults occurred in 2011. […]

The Presidential Directive that defined roles and responsibilities of Federal agencies in the event of a cyber incident is being applauded as a step in the right direction by private sector cybersecurity companies. […]

From 2006 to 2015, 6,700 firearms were transferred to individuals with prohibiting domestic violence records that should have prevented them from obtaining weapons. The Government Accountability Office stated that better analysis of Federal Bureau of Investigation data could help lead to improved background checks on domestic violence cases. […]

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Attorney General on June 29, arguing that a section of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act unconstitutionally criminalizes research aimed at determining whether online algorithms result in discrimination against certain races, genders, and other minority groups. […]

An update to the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, specifically Rule 41, which could automatically take effect in December, is once again bringing up concerns of privacy and security in the digital world. “The changes in Rule 41 leave Americans […] more exposed to threats, and, of course, put at risk their liberty,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. “Our lives are lived online; most of our most private information is stored on the cloud.” […]

Ransomware attacks, which the FBI estimated could cost the United States $1 billion this year, have “become a real plague on the Internet,” according to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. As these attacks are becoming more sophisticated and destructive, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary addressed whether law enforcement has the right tools to foil them. […]

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