Roughly nine months into his job as special agent in charge of the New Orleans office of the FBI, agent Eric Rommal is keenly aware of the dangers that cyber-criminals pose to Mississippi River-related businesses and infrastructure. And he wants the public at large to be aware as well.
“So the FBI has a number of priorities that we are responsible for. First and foremost obviously is a counter-terrorism threat and the counter-intelligence threat. But, cyber is our third most important investigative priority, and that’s because it’s prevalent—everyone uses the internet,” Rommal told The Associated Press in an interview.
“Everyone uses cyber in some form or fashion. And it’s not exclusive to Louisiana. It reaches far beyond Louisiana” Rommal said.
Rommal, accompanied by special agents Matthew Ramey, who supervises the office’s cyber squad, and Drew Watts, an assistant special agent in charge discussed a litany of vulnerabilities and the ways the FBI in New Orleans is fighting them.
A hacker disrupting those operations could effectively disrupt nationwide and international commerce, he said.
“I think the cyber threat is ever-evolving, unfortunately,” Rommal said. “So many more technology apparatus are introduced into commerce and into society that we use every day for convenience.”
FBI statistics show some 41,000 victims lost $2.9 billion to cyber-thieves nationally from October of 2013 to May of this year, said Ramey. “In all of 2017, we saw over $5 million leave the state of Louisiana to computer intrusion actors,” he added. “So far, in 2018, we’re on track to surpass that.”
In addition, the agents acknowledged threats to public utilities—New Orleans, for instance, draws its drinking water from the river—and various flood-control structures and pumping systems.
Rommal said more than 20 people working for the FBI headquarters in Louisiana are working on cyber security.
They include experts working at forensics labs in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, doing forensics on computer hard drives, and developing techniques for analyzing computer memories in efforts to fight and find intruders.