Microsoft Launches A Counterattack Against Russia's 'Fancy Bear' Hackers (thedailybeast.com)

Kevin Poulsen writes on the Daily Beast: It turns out Microsoft has something even more formidable than Moscow's malware: Lawyers. Last year attorneys for the software maker quietly sued the hacker group known as Fancy Bear in a federal court outside Washington DC, accusing it of computer intrusion, cybersquatting, and infringing on Microsoft's trademarks... Since August, Microsoft has used the lawsuit to wrest control of 70 different command-and-control points from Fancy Bear... Rather than getting physical custody of the servers, which Fancy Bear rents from data centers around the world, Microsoft has been taking over the Internet domain names that route to them. These are addresses like "livemicrosoft[.]net" or "rsshotmail[.]com" that Fancy Bear registers under aliases for about $10 each. Once under Microsoft's control, the domains get redirected from Russia's servers to the company's, cutting off the hackers from their victims, and giving Microsoft a omniscient view of that servers' network of automated spies. "In other words," Microsoft outside counsel Sten Jenson explained in a court filing last year, "any time an infected computer attempts to contact a command-and-control server through one of the domains, it will instead be connected to a Microsoft-controlled, secure server."

Comments

Re:If It Weren't For Russia

[AK Marc]

Nope, you are looking at WWII without Russia, but failed to account for the 10,000 years before that. If there were no Russia, the Mongols would have conquered the land in that area long ago, then the question of who would have been holding it for WWI. If Russia didn't participate in WWI, the results may have been different. And since WWII was a result of WWI, that would cause a great difference in WWII, if it ever happened. So no, it's unlikely we'd be speaking German, though it has been proposed as the official language of the USA, back when there were almost as many German speakers as English speakers, Before WWI, we've fought the English, but not the Germans. Another reason there was a big push to join WWI with the Germans against the English. Had we not soured on Germany from WWII, we'd still be talking about whether we entered WWI on the wrong side. But with Germany earning villain status in WWII, we retcon'ed justification for fighting against them in WWI.