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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."
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.
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.
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.
"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?
I was wondering about that too -- how much compute power does it take to combat a Botnet, and why does it require Azure -- couldn't Amazon AWS would just as well?
Yes they could have had a proper security model in the early 90s, and yes they could have forced all users to run under limited accounts by default. But let's not let that get in the way of the #1 reason Windows has this many known vulnerabilities - when you're on 90%+ of the world's PCs, you make one hell of a juicy target.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
Why use someone else's cloud when you can plug your own? That, and the money stays in-house instead of going to a competitor.
Well yeah, I understand why Microsoft uses Azure, but they make it sound like Azure is an important part of why Microsoft can fight off a botnet, when there are plenty of other cloud services out there that have similar capabilities.
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.
My point wasn't how does Azure suddenly make this possible. My point was how does cloud computing in general make this happen?
Anything you do on the "cloud", i can do in my basement.
My point wasn't how does Azure suddenly make this possible. My point was how does cloud computing in general make this happen?
Anything you do on the "cloud", i can do in my basement.
The cloud can make some things much more economical. If you need 1000 servers spun up within an hour and only need them for 24 hours, you're going to spend a lot more doing that in your basement than you'd spend at a cloud provider.