Working out of an office in a tech hub along the Monongahela River, Strom wears short-sleeves and loose pants, the uniform of a man who fights crime at a computer keyboard. His unit has a storied place in that world. It was behind DarkMarket, an elite English-language hackers forum that turned out to be an FBI sting when 56 of its members were arrested in 2008.
Before turning to the cyber world, Strom spent most of his FBI career fighting the Mafia. It's was good training, he said.
Like the Mob
"The stance we take is looking at it through the lens of organized crime," he said. It took the better part of the 1980s and early 1990s for federal authorities to understand and begin to dismantle the U.S. mafia: develop investigative capacity, penetrate complex enterprises, pass new laws. It will take time with global cybercrime as well, Strom said.
"We're trying to keep pace with how the crime is evolving," he said.
Facing sophisticated cartels, the FBI and European law enforcement officials have created new cybersquads and launched major investigations. In October 2010, the FBI began one of its most ambitious cybercrime operations. Code-named Trident Breach, authorities broke up an international crime ring responsible for stealing $70 million from online bank accounts of small businesses and local government throughout the U.S. and Europe. There were arrests in four countries, including 39 in the U.S.
Frustrations
That success was accompanied by frustrations faced daily by investigators: There is almost no chance the world's top cybercriminals -- residing in safe-haven countries like Belarus, Romania, and Ukraine -- will ever be brought to justice. Most of the individuals detained last year were international students who, acting as so-called mules, withdrew money from the hackers' U.S. bank accounts and forwarded it home. Five people who were described as kingpins were detained for questioning in Ukraine. All five were eventually set free without seeing the inside of a courtroom, the FBI said in September.
"Cybergangs, mainly in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, are making money that rivals some drug cartels," said Richard Clarke, former special adviser on cybersecurity to U.S. President George W. Bush, at an October conference on network security. "There is frankly nothing the FBI and Secret Service can do about it."
In April, the Department of Justice dismantled one of the largest known criminal botnets, a network of infected computers programmed to send data automatically from their hard drives to a server controlled by hackers. The department declared the break-up of Coreflood, as the botnet was known, a major victory.
The Russians
It said almost nothing about the criminals who ran it. Researchers at Dell SecureWorks, the Atlanta-based security firm that aided the investigation, said the kingpins behind Coreflood are three Russians last known to be living comfortably in Rostov, a mid-size city on the Don River.
"Our relationship with the Russians is always a work in progress," Strom said.