‘You need a room full of these people’<\/span>
\n<\/h3>\n“I’d love to have those people within my teams here at Interpol,” Witschi said. “But the problem is, I generally can’t afford them. And when you think of the nuances and the issues across all cybercrime, you really need a big room full of these types of people to canvas all the issues \u2013 whether it’s DDoS or BEC or ransomware attacks or phishing.”<\/p>\n
“The Gateway project really gives us a lot more capacity and capabilities to get things done on a global stage,” he noted.<\/p>\n
Fortinet is one of Gateway’s founding private-sector partners. In an interview with The Register<\/em>, Derek Manky, chief security strategist at Fortinet, said that this partnership is different from other threat-sharing relationships between private vendors and public agencies. These typically involve working with government agencies to harden infrastructure, create new security policies or share technical indicators of compromise, he explained.<\/p>\n“But within the Gateway program, what’s unique is that it allows us a channel to respond to requests for intelligence,” Manky said. “It could be a piece of malware, or a new vulnerability that’s breaking. And we contextualize that.”<\/p>\n
Global security vendors have much greater visibility across regions that a local law enforcement team has, which helps with the contextualization piece, he explained. They can also look at the key indicators and techniques to tie a campaign to a particular threat actor and help with attribution, Manky added. <\/p>\n
“But then, how do you operationalize that? That’s critical, and that’s where we pass the ball” back to Interpol and law enforcement, he said. “This is how we work together. It can lead to arrest, it can lead to prosecutions, it could lead to possible freezing of assets. Any one of those is a step in the right direction and it sends a message back to the criminals.”<\/p>\n