Q&A With FBI's Cyber Division Chief

2008-08-19 10:08

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/08/qa_with_fbis_cyber_crime_chief.html By Brian Krebs Security Fix August 18, 2008 At the end of the Black Hat hacker convention in Las Vegas a week ago Thursday, I had a few minutes to sit down with James Finch, head of the FBI's Cyber Division. What follows is an excerpted Q&A from that discussion, in which Finch describes himself as a serious geek who refuses to be spooked by organized cyber criminal gangs that target online banking customers and other 'Netizens. Q: I see you've got a nice MacBook Pro there. Are you a pure Mac user? A: No, I am not. I raised my daughters on Windows machines, but my 4-year-old son, I'm raising him on a Mac. I just bought him an iMac. I prefer flavors of Unix over Windows. Q: Which flavors? A: Well, I'm running SUSE, Fedora 9. I don't spend as much quality time with these operating systems as I used to. Q: So what does the director of the FBI's cyber crime division like to do in his spare time? A: Build computers, learn new operating systems. One thing this job doesn't give me enough time to do is spend quality time with my computers. I was a gamer before gaming was cool, playing games like Doom, Quake, Half-Life, [Castle] Wolfenstein. I have quite a few newer games and because of the faster video cards....the last machine I built was a water-cooled video card as well as the processor. In the wintertime, it's great. Keeps the processor cool, but just heats up the room, and I haven't' even put the other video card in it to run in SLI mode. Q: Are you a coder, or...? A: No, I'm not. I started out as a computer science major in college. Back then, the required courses were Fortran, COBOL, Pascal...all the things that don't exist anymore [laughs]. And, so any programming experience I have is obsolete. I've bought the books to do some self-teaching for Java, but I just haven't had the time to sit down and start picking it up. Q: So why do you prefer Linux? A: I just think it's more efficient. To me, it's more powerful. You don't need this huge powerful processor because of the efficiency associated with the Unix operating system. I believe it's closer to how we should be computing. But, you know, it's not to really..I don't want to dismiss Windows, because it's serving a very useful purpose. Because of Microsoft, you have people who wouldn't otherwise be using computers. [...] __________________________________________________ Visit Defcon Pics - Defcon Memory Repository http://www.defconpics.org

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