The FBI is asking for a further $106m in its fiscal 2023 budget to manage a range of pressing cybersecurity issues.
The comments were made by FBI director Christopher Wray in a prepared testimony before a congressional committee last week.
According to Wray, the cyber-related requests make up nearly a third of the $324.6m needed for various program enhancements. These including foreign intelligence threats, international and domestic terrorism and IT upgrades needed to process a climbing amount of data generated as part of the FBI’s investigative work.
The FBI is asking for a total of $10.8bn for its budget for fiscal 2023, which is a 6% increase on last year.
Wray said, “Throughout these last two years, the FBI has seen a wider-than-ever range of cyber actors threaten Americans’ safety, security, and confidence in our digitally connected world.” These threats range from supply-chain compromise to intellectual property theft to espionage. The FBI outlined that it has took over 1,110 actions against cyber adversaries, including arrests, criminal charges, convictions, disruptions and dismantlement’s.
The FBI director added that the organisation wants to spend $52m to add 137 positions to enhance cyber information-sharing abilities and increase cyber tools and capacities. An extra $36.9m would be used to fund nine new positions make other investments to help protect internal FBI networks.
The budget request of the FBI also involves an additional $17m to invest in tools and network upgrades to process large amounts of data associated with investigative work.
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