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Tired of Playing Cyber Cop, Microsoft Looks For Partners In Crime Fighting
chicksdaddy writes: When it comes to fighting cybercrime, few companies can claim to have done as much as Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, which spent the last five years as the Internet's Dirty Harry: using its size, legal muscle and wealth to single-handedly take down cyber criminal networks from Citadel, to Zeus to the recent seizure of servers belonging to the (shady) managed DNS provider NO-IP. The company's aggressive posture towards cyber crime outfits and the companies that enable them has earned it praise, but also criticism. That was the case last week after legitimate customers of NO-IP alleged that Microsoft's unilateral action had disrupted their business. There's evidence that those criticisms are hitting home – and that Microsoft may be growing weary of its role as judge, jury and executioner of online scams. Microsoft Senior Program Manager Holly Stewart gave a sober assessment of the software industry's fight against cyber criminal groups and other malicious actors. Speaking to a gathering of cyber security experts and investigators at the 26th annual FIRST Conference in Boston, she said that the company has doubts about the long term effectiveness of its botnet and malware takedowns.
If Microsoft hadn't built such insecure operating systems, the problem wouldn't be so big. This is the company that brought you Active-X, autorun, and the ability to invoke programs from spreadsheets and documents.
dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner,
Batman
i for one welcome our botnet overlord masters?
ed
Few companies can claim to have done as much fighting - or feeding - cybercrime.
There, fixed that for you.
recent seizure of servers belonging to the (shady) managed DNS provider NO-IP
That's blatantly libelous journalism right there.
1. Make email White-list based (with a choice to opt out), That will kill spam
2. Allow people to "lock" their machines so they will only download from curated sites., That will severely hurt malware sites.
3. Allow web browsers to 'block' sites/IPs on a per country basis, e.g. all of Ukraine, Russia,China,Brazil, etc, that will kill the redirect bots
4. Allow countries to place Tariffs on imported goods from countries that do not take positive action against cybercrime, nothing inspires politicians like a loss of money into the economy. Make it part of the UN, so if "proven" the UN can sanction ALL countries to add tariffs, no country can "Veto" this sanction.
5. Allow the courts to seek fines and restitution for losses from ISPs/individuals if they are notified of malware/bots and they do nothing about them, and that international cases get paid out by the offenders government (who then seeks to get the money back from the perpetrators).
6. Make 2 factor authentication the minimum standard for online activities.
So in America, Microsoft polices the internet. Who polices in real life? McDonalds? Disney?
I've used No-ip for non-mission-critical dynamic IP services and for domain registration for over 10 years. There's nothing "shady" about them.
They offer a free service that is sometimes exploited by criminals and are very responsive to reports of abuse.
Microsoft not only didn't report these criminals to no-ip- they actually sealed the court order so they could seize the domains before no-ip found out about it.
It boggles my mind that a vigilante corporation can get a court order to simply seize another companies assets.
After all, it's been found to be a criminal organization more than once in a court of law.
You give them too much credit - it's more like bringing an egg whisk to a gunfight.
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
Metonymy as a rhetorical device has been used since ancient times. Get used to it.
all the holes in Windows and commercial software that allow so many criminals to profit from the security holes?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
...only if you consider that stubby, broken off plastic thing they are waving around a 'knife'
Microsoft has been writing poor quality software for my entire life.
The best programmers do not go to work for Microsoft. Maybe that was the case in the early 90's but it hasn't been true for decades.
To make matters worse, Microsoft does a lot of its programming in India. We all know that Indian programming is of poor quality, and the reason is not because Indian programmers are much less competent. It has more to do with the fact that in programming if two parties can't communicate completely unambiguously in one language then they have no hope of writing good software. Programmers have to be more than fluent in the language they speak with each other, they have to be scientifically precise.
People go to work for Microsoft because it's safe. There's no risk of the company going under. Risk minimizers don't write good software, because they're not very creative. They tend to keep patching up the same old crap rather than writing something new that works better.
At mature software companies hundreds of non-programmers are telling the programmers what to do, and it only gums up the works. You wind up not working efficiently, because you need too much sign off to get anything done. And once you get signoff, the hundreds of non-programmers are dictating your schedule, not quality of the code or whether it is completed to your satisfaction.
There is no one to clean up Microsoft's mess but themselves. Probably the best solution would be for the company to split up. The people who make the Xbox are probably weighed down by the rest of the company's ineptitude. I'd like to see those guys go their own way.
No-IP isn't shady any more than are steak knife manufacturers.
Microsoft Looks For Partners In Crime
In other news, Google is the most popular site for finding <your choice of illegal material here>.
See what I did there? And how the reports of NO-IP's use for malicious software are meaningless?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
"When it comes to fighting cybercrime, few companies can claim to have done as much as Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft"
.. were not initially designed with Internet security" ref
Despite how much effort Microsoft retrospectively put into trying to change the historical facts. When it comes to causing cybercrime, few companies can claim to have done as much damage as Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft.
"Windows NT and its successors
sounds to me like we need develop more user friendly distributed anonamous internet tools. while the tools we have work when used they are not user freindly and often have horrible documentation. We need a suit of tools to fix the internet to stop corporate/government control over the web. include tor freenet i2p namecoin & bitcoin, retroshare and pgp. encrypt everything end to end and make domain hijacking impossible.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Thinking back to the old hardware you could have a secure sandpit and memory on Unix like devices.
You could have a secure sandpit and memory on consumer computers at a huge cost in cash and GUI slowness.
Speed to market for 1.0, GUI look and feel, security, costs, speed to market with new features vs security.
Helping the police and security services without slowing down the dev and release cycle.
The hardware was just too costly and slow at the consumer level vs a responsive, secure, feature rich software offering.
It was beyond the needs of the beta productivity and games rush to market.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
what about the NSA? How much of this "cyber crime" is related to government monitoring. I like how the focus shifts to Russia and China at a time when the US is being criticized/ignored for leading an international spying ring! How much malware has hit the internet lead by governments working together, until its caught in the wild then they all blame each other or some group as the cause?
That's the real problem anymore, no one knows who is responsible for half the shit going on. Even better you can set-up fake groups in enemy countries to redirect any attention away from your objective. And MS seems to be behind a lot of bullshit lately after being targeted for allowing possible backdoors in its software.
need to crack down on the Russian government
The Russian government? How about assigning responsibility where it belongs?
TFA is pure revisionist propaganda on the scale of editing Trotsky out of of pictures with Stalin. In reality, TFA should start:
When it comes to enabling cybercrime, few companies can claim to have done as much as Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft,
Plenty of us remember how fragile and colander-like most Microsoft OSs have been until VERY recently.
Apparently it's forbidden Here to say anything bad about MS, but still. It is cause of monopoly that we have these problems. In healthy market it would BE difficult to take control of many machines when there would be many platforms.
Now media only mentions when MS uses it's Monopoly to take down those bots it has enabled.
Microsoft,
Nobody asked you to play cyberpolice - you took that upon yourselves in an attempt to make yourselves look better after being the laughingstock of security experts for several decades. Lately you've been overstepping your bounds and now you're looking for other companies to join you so that you don't have to take all of the heat the next time you overstep your bounds. Good luck with that.
What we need is a government organization dedicated to keeping our networks safe. I'm thinking the exact opposite of the NSA, where instead of weakening our security and pushing to get back doors installed in everything they actually worked to protect us and promote national security.