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[ISN] Microsoft's Superhero Cyber Crime Fighting Unit
From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_nospam>Date: Tue Mar 27 2012 - 07:06:46 GMT
To: isn@infosecnews.org
By Rebecca Greenfield
The Atlantic Wire
March 26, 2012
When Microsoft's not making software or technological marvels in its
labs, it's fighting crimes with its Digital Crimes Unit. This morning we
learned about one of its missions, from The New York Times, which sounds
more like a scene in a movie than something that goes on at a geeky
computer company. "Microsoft employees, accompanied by United States
marshals, raided two nondescript office buildings in Pennsylvania and
Illinois on Friday, aiming to disrupt one of the most pernicious forms
of online crime today — botnets, or groups of computers that help
harvest bank account passwords and other personal information from
millions of other computers," write The Times' Nick Wingfield and Nicole
Perlroth. Raiding a crime scene isn't exactly something we associate
with Microsoft, but the company has a whole Digital Crimes Unit devote
to this type of thing.
> From the sounds of it, Microsoft is like the Batman of cyber-crime.
Dissatisfied with the way traditional law enforcement agencies have
handled Internet evil, the company looks into these security holes
itself. "The sweep was part of a civil suit brought by Microsoft in its
increasingly aggressive campaign to take the lead in combating such
crimes, rather than waiting for law enforcement agencies to act,"
continue Wingfield and Perlroth. And, like Batman it has the money to do
it -- it once offered a $250,000 reward for information related to the
identification and conviction of hackers operating a group of bots.
This Zeus counter-offensive was just one of many successful cyber-crime
initiatives to come out of the Digital Crimes Unit. In February 2010,
Microsoft announced operation b49, "the groundbreaking legal and
technical efforts led by Microsoft in cooperation with academic and
industry experts around the world to shut down the notorious Waledac
botnet," as a Microsoft blog post puts it. The Digital Crimes Unit has
also succeeded in dismantling two additional botnet groups named Rustock
and Kelihos.
[...]
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