Brett Leatherman, a career FBI official with extensive cybersecurity experience, has been tapped to serve as the new assistant director. He will now lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s very important and highly active Cyber Division, a critical national security role. In a recent post on LinkedIn, Leatherman stated he was chosen by the new FBI Director Kash Patel to take over this role. He is officially following Bryan Vorndran, who has recently retired from his position as the former head of the division. Leatherman will be stepping up from his previous position as the deputy assistant FBI director for all of the cyber operations. He thanked Vorndran for making the division both “partnership focused and victim centric.”
Leatherman has spent more than two decades at the FBI, previously working in the Cleveland and also the Detroit field offices. He was also the section chief of National Security Cyber Operations, where he worked on many state-affiliated cyberthreats. As deputy assistant director, he directly managed the teams handling sophisticated criminal and also state-sponsored cyber groups targeting the US. In his new role, he has pledged to “impose cost on our cyber adversaries while supporting victims of cyber crime.” His stated charge is simple but not easy: making all malicious cyber activity completely unsustainable through a variety of different proactive measures.
This mission includes disrupting actors and sharing vital intelligence with partners.
The former head of the Cyber Division, Bryan Vorndran, has now retired after serving in the crucial role since the year 2021. Vorndran has now officially joined Microsoft as the company’s new deputy CISO, responsible for the cybersecurity of all global supply chains. He is widely credited with making the FBI much more aggressive in its sustained efforts to disrupt malicious hackers and cybercrime gangs. During his notable tenure as the head of the division, the bureau greatly expanded its anti-cybercrime tactics beyond just arrests. The FBI now is much more likely to conduct active incident response, such as outreach to LockBit ransomware victims and infrastructure takedowns. They also work to claw back ransomware payments.
Bryan Vorndran explained in a 2022 interview that pressuring the threat means eroding the ecosystem in which all of these criminals operate.
This includes targeting their malware developers, their traditional infrastructure, their illicit money, and also their various different communication channels. He also helped to popularize the important security advisories that are released alongside multiple other U.S. government agencies, such as CISA. This important interagency collaboration has helped to draw significant public attention to many emerging digital threats facing the entire nation. It also gave the private sector a greater understanding of possible risks so that resilience could be prioritized accordingly by companies.
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