FBI director outlines threat of cyber attacks in speech at University of Kansas

LAWRENCE — FBI director Christopher Wray provided a sobering analysis Thursday of the increasingly “complex and persistent and severe” cybersecurity threat posed by foreign adversaries to national security, the economy and critical infrastructure.

In a speech at the University of Kansas Cybersecurity Conference, Wray said criminals use ransomware to wreak havoc on business operations, food distributors, 911 call centers, police departments, schools and hospitals with the goal of “disrupting our democratic society.”

“They’re more pervasive, hit a wider array of victims and carry the potential for greater damage than ever before,” Wray said. “Even as I’m standing here talking to you, we’re investigating more than 100 different ransomware variants, each of them with scores and scores of victims.”

Wray said the FBI places a premium on collaborations with academic partners, including KU, to confront the threats.

Congress has earmarked $22 million for the KU National Security Innovation Center, an economic development organization and business incubator. The funding will help pay for an 80,000-square-foot high-security office and lab space.

Republican U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran, who announced the federal funding during the cybersecurity conference, said the project was part of his dream to provide educational opportunities for Kansans, as well as the opportunity to have careers and raise families in the state.

“I want to make certain that we do everything today that increases the chances that the student, the young kid, a kid growing up in small town or big city Kansas, who happens to get fascinated by science or engineering or mathematics, has a place to be educated,” Moran said.

“What a great thing it would be if you wanted to study science and engineering, be a researcher, and you said, ‘I want to go to school in Kansas.’ And if you wanted a career in those fields, you said, ‘I want to live in Kansas,’ ” he added.

Moran said his work as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee — he joked that’s “probably an oxymoron for most of you — made him realize that other countries are doing everything they can to steal America’s secrets. If they get a leg up, he said, they can “succeed in diminishing the future of the United States of America.”

“The threats are real,” Moran said. “They’re growing. They’re damaging, and the capabilities of our adversaries are increasing.”

Wray identified China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as the most prominent of foreign adversaries. He said foreign intelligence officers moonlight as cyber criminals, and profit-minded criminals by day are state-sponsored hackers by night.

“It’s getting more and more difficult to discern where cybercriminal activity ends and adversarial nation-state activity begins, as the line between the two just gets blurrier and blurrier,” Wray said.

The good news, he said, is the FBI has demonstrated success in taking down Russian malware and high-profile ransomware gangs. He said agents collaborate with allies to compromise criminal command and control networks, shut down their servers and websites, and deploy encryption protections. The FBI also targets money launderers and cryptocurrency wallets connected to illegal activity in an effort to “try to hit them everywhere it hurts and then put them down, hard.”

KU chancellor Doug Girod said the university was committed to doing the research that would push the field of cybersecurity forward. The work was necessary, he joked, because during the pandemic he received notice that fraudulent unemployment claims had been filed on his behalf in three states.

“This world of cyber warfare is really World War 3, and we are losing it right now,” Girod said. “We just can’t see it.”