A book excerpt details how the FBI failed to undertake fundamental reforms to combat cybercrime, including confronting escalating cyberthreats like ransomware
ProPublica : Tweets: @renee_dudley , @propublica , @propublica , and @danlgolden Tweets: Renee Dudley / @renee_dudley : In 2015, a dozen frustrated agents from the FBI's Cyber Division met with then Director James Comey. They told him that their skills were either disregarded or misunderstood by other agents and supervisors across the bureau. https://www.propublica.org/... @propublica : FBI agent Milan Patel realized most of his Cyber Division colleagues didn't have a tech background. The FBI tried to turn traditional law enforcement officers into tech specialists while passing over computer scientists. https://www.propublica.org/... @propublica : Within the FBI, cyber agents were derisively called the Geek Squad mocked by others. “What do you need a gun for?” SWAT team jocks would say. “Do you have to do pushups with a keyboard in your backpack?” asked a senior leader at the bureau. https://www.propublica.org/... Dan Golden / @danlgolden : In today's ProPublica excerpt from “The Ransomware Hunting Team,” Renee and I show why this volunteer band of tech wizards is so desperately needed; they're filling the void left by the FBI's ineffectiveness in fighting ransomware. https://www.propublica.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This excerpt supplies the internal-culture backstory to a failure pattern the related coverage has documented for years: the bureau's year-long silence while Fancy Bear targeted hundreds of officials, Director Wray's admission that agents could not unlock most of the phones they seized, and the 2023 finding that the FBI sat on identified hackers behind the MGM and Caesars breaches. The book's account — traditional law-enforcement officers retrained as tech specialists while computer scientists were passed over, and cyber agents mocked as the 'Geek Squad' — explains why those external failures kept recurring.
The stakes are visible on both sides of the bureau: the DOJ stood up a ransomware taskforce in 2021 precisely because the ecosystem was proliferating faster than enforcement, while CISA was reported as underfunded and outmatched the same season. A volunteer Ransomware Hunting Team forming to fill the FBI's void is the clearest signal that victims stopped waiting for the bureau.
First-order effects
- FBI Cyber Division agents and recruits face a documented talent-inversion problem — computer scientists bypassed for converted street agents — which directly limits the bureau's capacity to work the ransomware and intrusion cases already on its books.
- Ransomware victims and their insurers now route around the FBI, relying on the volunteer Ransomware Hunting Team for incident response the bureau has not delivered.
Second-order effects
- The DOJ's ransomware taskforce and CISA absorb caseload and political pressure the FBI's Cyber Division cannot carry, shifting the center of federal cyber enforcement toward those bodies.
- Persistent no-action episodes like the MGM/Caesars hacker identifications erode corporate willingness to share breach data with the bureau, degrading the very intelligence pipeline cyber investigations depend on.
Third-order effects
- If the conversion-over-hiring personnel model persists, US cyber enforcement structurally consolidates around DOJ taskforces, CISA, and private/volunteer responders, with the FBI reduced to a secondary role in the domain it nominally leads.
- Sustained exposé-driven scrutiny of the bureau's internal culture creates pressure for congressional oversight of how cyber-agent hiring and promotion actually work — an accountability question the coverage keeps raising but no reform has yet answered.
The trend: US cyber enforcement capacity is diffusing away from the FBI toward DOJ taskforces, CISA, and volunteer responders as the bureau's internal talent failures compound.