The US National Security Division (NSD) formed a Cyber Section dubbed NatSec Cyber, which is tasked with analyzing the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) investigative abilities.
“NSD is committed to matching our adversaries by adjusting our tactics and organization to bring all of our tools, authorities, and expertise to this fight,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said when he introduced the new agency during a speech at the Hoover Institute on Tuesday. “This new section will allow NSD to increase the scale and speed of disruption campaigns and prosecutions of nation-state threat actors, state-sponsored cybercriminals, associated money launderers, and other cyber-enabled threats to national security.”
According to Olsen, individual agencies simply lack the manpower or resources to effectively deal with different cybersecurity tasks, for the NSD will serve as something of a cybersecurity backbone for other agencies. It will work in direct collaboration with Criminal Division’s Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) and the FBI’s Cyber Division.
“NatSec Cyber will serve as an incubator, able to invest in the time-intensive and complex investigative work for early-stage cases,” Olsen said. They’re working to appoint prosecutors to the new section that can work quickly to support investigations and disruptions, starting at the earliest stages of development.
During the same speech on Tuesday, Olsen remarked that the DoJ has recently had success taking down the Snake malware network and the LockBit and Hive ransomware gang. These two Russian-based hacker groups were part of ongoing campaigns, collecting hundreds of millions in ransom money and targeting hospitals, schools, government agencies, and more.
Cybersecurity is also a mounting concern in the West, with increasingly disruptive attacks being launched from international (mostly Russian-based) hacking groups. NatSec Cyber will help different law enforcement agencies combat this international threat, on par with the NSD’s Counterterrorism Section and the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section.