WASHINGTON — Confronting a growing threat to national security, the Justice Department has begun training hundreds of prosecutors to combat and prosecute cyber espionage and related crimes, senior department officials said.
The training is part of an overhaul after an internal review that pinpointed gaps in the department’s ability to identify and respond to potential terrorist attacks over the Internet and to the rapidly growing crime of cyber-espionage, the officials said, describing it for the first time.
In recent weeks, the department has started training more than 300 lawyers in Washington and nearly 100 more across the country in the legal and technical skills needed to confront the increase in cyber-threats to national security.
Justice Department officials would not release the cyber-security review, but they said its conclusions led to the realignment.
“We are very vulnerable,”John Carlin, the principal deputy in Justice’s National Security Division, said in an interview. “Terrorist groups are saying publicly what they want to do - knock down the stock exchange and disrupt the electrical grid. We need to be more focused on this threat, and we need to be ready.”
Justice Department lawyers are grappling with two distinct categories of national-security threats from the Internet. One danger is from terrorists plotting full-scale cyber-attacks, and the other comes from hackers, cyber-criminals and foreign governments stealing trade secrets from the private sector and sensitive classified information from the military and government agencies.
“Other than a weapon of mass destruction going off in one of our major cities, this is the most significant threat to our economy and national security,” said Shawn Henry, who just retired as the FBI’s top cyber-sleuth and now works with companies infiltrated by foreign-intelligence services. “The amount of electronic espionage going on is unprecedented.”
Business, Pages 21 on 07/30/2012