Gary Warner, UAB’s director of Research and Computer Forensics, will be featured on NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams at 9 p.m. Wednesday, March 21, 2012, in a story about the FBI Trident Breach case. The FBI credited Warner and his UAB students with helping the agency track down the international cyber-crime ring responsible for stealing tens of millions of dollars online.
NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel traveled around the globe to tell the entire story. It is a story that begins with work done at UAB. Warner and his students used the UAB Spam Data Mine, which gathers and analyzes 1 million spam emails daily, to connect all the individual crimes back to each criminal. Once UAB students identified the criminals they used Facebook to reveal their profiles that contained photos with piles of money and posts flaunting their cyber-crime spree.
Warner and his students do their work as part of the UAB Center for Information Assurance and Joint Forensics Research, a multi-disciplinary research center that combines resources from law enforcement, business, government agencies and other research institutions. Recently Warner also was credited for his efforts in exposing another international online crime ring during Operation Ghost Click.