By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
One of the FBI’s biggest challenges is hackers who are targeting political and financial groups and personal computers.
To combat cyberattacks, the FBI is looking for elite coders who have the technology background to help.
“One problem? A culture clash between elite coders who are attracted to casual — or even rebellious workplaces — and the agency’s bureaucratic reputation,” the Washington Post reports.
FBI Director James Comey is trying to make the agency hip enough to attract recruits.
“We’re working very hard inside the FBI to be a whole lot cooler than you may think we are,” he said during his remarks at a Symantec Government Symposium last week.
That doesn’t mean the FBI has added “beanbags and granola and a lot of whiteboards,” Comey said.
“But we’re working very hard at marching in that direction, so that when this talent comes into our organization we are open to having them make us better — in a way that connects us and them to our mission more closely,” he said.
The Washington Post wrote:
Despite outreach at high profile hacker conferences like Black Hat and DefCon, recruitment of tech whiz kids by law enforcement and intelligence agencies has been hampered in recent years. One issue is that they have to compete with private sector gigs that can offer better salaries and benefits.
But fallout over surveillance programs revealed in Snowden documents and the FBI’s legal battle to get Apple to help it break into a locked iPhone used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino, Calif., attacks has also made government work a hard sell to some.
