The Ransomware Hunting Team by Renee Dudley

Author:Renee Dudley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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By 2012, FBI leadership recognized that most crimes involved some technical element—the use of email or cell phones, for example. So that year, it began to prioritize hiring non-agent computer scientists to help on cases. These civilian cyber experts, who worked in field offices around the country, did not carry weapons and were not required to pass regular physical fitness tests. But respect for the non-gun-carrying technical experts—the kind of appreciation that John Fokker of the HTCU described—was lacking. This widespread condescension was reflected in a nickname that Stacy Arruda, the early NIPC agent who went on to a career as a supervisor in the Cyber Division, had for them: dolphins.

“Someone who is highly intelligent and can’t communicate with humans,” said Stacy, who retired from the FBI in 2018. “When we would travel, we would bring our dolphins with us. And when the other party started squeaking, we would have our dolphins squeak right back at them.”

If agents like Milan and Anthony had a hard time winning the institutional respect of the FBI, it seemed almost impossible for the dolphins to do so. They worked on technical aspects of all types of cases, not just cyber ones. Yet, despite the critical role they played in investigating cyber cases—sometimes as the sole person in a field office who understood the technical underpinnings of a case—these civilian computer scientists were often regarded as agents’ support staff and treated as second-class citizens.

Randy Pargman took a circuitous route to becoming the Seattle field office’s dolphin. In many ways, Randy and Michael Gillespie are kindred spirits—soft-spoken, self-described nerds with an understated passion for public service. Randy came to love computers the same way Michael did, through ham radio and from his grandmother.

As a kid in California, Randy regularly hung out with his grandma, who was interested in technology. She bought magazines that contained basic code and helped Randy copy it onto their Atari video game console. It was his introduction to computer programming. Later, as a teenager, Randy was drawn to a booth of ham radio enthusiasts at a county fair and soon began saving up to buy his own $300 radio. It was the early 1990s, before most home users were online, so Randy was thrilled when he used the radio to access pages from a library in Japan and send primitive emails.

After high school, Randy put his radio skills to work when he became a Washington State Patrol dispatcher. Although it wasn’t a part of the job description, he created one computer program to improve the dispatch system’s efficiency and another to automate the state’s process for investigating fraud in vehicle registrations. The experience led him to study computer science at Mississippi State. In the summer of 2000, while still in college, Randy completed an FBI internship, an experience that left him with a deep appreciation for the bureau’s mission. So, following brief stints working for the Department of Defense and as a private-sector software engineer once he graduated, he applied to become an agent.

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