Slashdot Mirror
Inside Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit
jfruh writes "You may find it mildly creepy that Microsoft has a private police force, but the Digital Crimes Unit has helped real law enforcement do things like disrupt huge botnets. According to Richard Boscovich, assistant general counsel for the Digital Crimes Unit, Microsoft is only able to do all this by relying on the company's existing infrastructure, including its Azure cloud service. The DCU can provision compute time from the cloud as necessary to combat complex threats, he said, and also uses cloud services to share information with law enforcement agencies quickly."
So, it has come to this.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
AKA the Windows 8 development team.
And here I thought from the headline that TFA would be about a group at Microsoft in charge of *committing* digital crimes!
(That would have been funnier 15 years ago. At this point, I would say if Microsoft needed a full-time team to commit crimes, it would be only so they could catch up to the competition.)
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Did the CEO ever throw a chair through the forensics labs' plate glass window?
merely confirmation of corporate dystopia
it's a great future we live in!
Too bad that what they're really doing is play whack-a-mole with botnets, apparently more for the fawning press releases than to actually solve a problem. If only they'd been a little less lax with their code "security was not a priority" practices, we'd all been far better off. So much for redmond improving the world through their wonderful software.
Does this sound corrupt or what? They created the problem and now they have a solution, but at a cost. Sounds like double dipping into the customer's wallet.
"Microsoft is only able to do all this by relying on the company's existing infrastructure, including its Azure cloud service"
Yea sure, the cloud enabled you to do this. Infomercial much?
In the digital justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important values. The ones who investigate crime and the zeros who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories. Dun Dun.
area. It is the 4Erson. Ask your
Not nearly quite as unsettling as the government having a public one.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Law and Order: DCU will certainly be a show within 2 years maybe?
Can be done with any of the cloud providers. They just chose azure but doesnt mean it can "only" be done with it like they say in the slashvertisement.
Such a better name that the old one "Internet Explorer".
They may assist the police with some things, but what they mostly do is go around making sure that you have (the correct) licenses for your windows boxes. Anyone that's dealt with Microsoft's licenses knows that it's a huge mess that's difficult to understand as some licenses overlap in their design. Once you have the wrong license, even if the license that you have is much much more expensive than the one you need, these guys come at you bro, hard - as if you are a criminal.
It's this very business model that we all loathe so.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
... and charge for them, even if they don't work.
MS knows about criminal behavior all right. Which makes me wonder how anybody can work for them and not fee filthy? Well, money talks, I guess.
Microsoft acting as a law enforcement agency deeply disturbs me. Why is a corporation being allowed to do this? I know there is some oversight by real law enforcement agencies, but the government has essentially picked MS as a white-hat good guy, and allowed them to do things no other citizen could do like be involved in confiscating private property.
... was the biggest digital crime of my era.
"In mid-November, Microsoft unveiled a facility on its Redmond, Wash., campus that had become the new home for its Digital Crimes Unit. It took the opportunity to offer up new details about the multi-agency initiative that disrupted the huge Citadel botnet earlier this year" - from article source -> http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/394553/how-azure-helps-microsoft-take-down-cyber-criminals
Citadel's STILL alive though -> https://zeustracker.abuse.ch/monitor.php?filter=lastupdated
(Sinkholing, while effective, doesn't ALWAYS work... that's proof...)
It's also WHY I almost never remove validly known botnet C&C Servers (malware-in-general etc.) in my custom hosts file @ 2,199,119++ entries strong & growing daily.
Why? Fastflux & Dynamic DNS utilizing botnets is why. They recycle/reuse them. Even if only "eventually" after long periods. So not responding to pings (easily faked in TCP parameters), or just not being up currently? Doesn't prove a valid testbed for removal either since that occurs.
I.E.-> Want to *try* to recycle them to use vs. me? Good luck - I'm "pre-covered" with data since 1997...
APK
P.S.=> I get the data & merge it with my existing hosts file (built since 1997) via this app I created in 32/64-bit code http://start64.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5851:apk-hosts-file-engine-64bit-version&catid=26:64bit-security-software&Itemid=74 to make the impossible for 1 person alone to do import-> deduplication & normalization filtering stages with that many entries vs. a 24-hour period - especially to combat this threat but it's only a partial reason why I use hosts. They give added speed, security, reliability vs. DNS hijack or failure, & even added "anonymity" to an extent if you wish as a "side-effect" of speedup & reliability features they yield...
... apk
Muphrey's law.
Murphy...
No, Muphry.