Inside the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit 54
Trailrunner7 writes "The Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit has been spearheading botnet takedowns and other anti-cybercrime operations for many years, and it has had remarkable success. But the cybercrime problem isn't going away anytime soon, so the DCU is in the process of building a new cybercrime center here, and soon will roll out a new threat intelligence service to help ISPs and CERT teams get better data about ongoing attacks. Dennis Fisher sat down with TJ Campana, director of security at the DCU, to discuss the unit's work and what threats could be next on the target list."
Wait a minute (Score:5, Funny)
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I lol'd.
Re:Wait a minute (Score:5, Funny)
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Is this an article about how the Windows 8 UI was designed?
Or about how they kept the world's population hostage with Clippy the Paperclip? I mean, when they heard Clippy was going to be removed from the next version of Office, around 350 million people upgraded straight away.
Or is it about how Microsoft is paying 500 million (USD, EUR, whatever) in fines every couple of years, in order to keep doing business as a software monopoly? That is probably the most brilliant crime by the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit ever!
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I want to know exactly what idiot gave Microsoft the authority to create a law enforcement unit other than their jackbooted licensing audit thugs from the Business Software Alliance.
Needs a judge's approval.
But we’re very careful about how we do this. We’re not just going out there shooting stuff. We walk in with a pile of legal documents. We’re asking for a judge to agree with what we found.
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But it is so hard to read all the way to the first question of the interview.
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- investigate security holes (preferably before shiping it out)
- make sure that virus-makers dont have a chance.
- find, cage and string up the idiot that makes Win8 harder to get rid of than a bad case of Herpes.
- see to it that three-letter-agency's (both US and nonUS) place backdoors in MS software.
- Explosions, romance, fast car's, flashing badges and glu
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You don't actually think Microsoft is going around kicking in doors, do you? They're mostly working as a legal presence or as a team of civilian experts assisting law enforcement and everything goes through a judge.
Re: This is rather disconcerting. (Score:3)
If they really wanted to 'stop crime' as their top objective they could just make a more secure product, starting by ejecting all the useless legacy code that lets the bad guys win without hardly trying. Its hard to make a secure design starting from a block of swiss cheese. There are more things they could do to make crime harder than I could ever possibly list in this limi
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Ok just one question first; Do we get to ride into battle on the back of a rampaging gnu leading a hoard of penguins and fight iNinjas?
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They're not actually doing anything illegal. The situation is like this: the offenders are in plain sight on the internet, they don't bother hiding because there is nobody policing where they're enacting their schemes.
MS is exposing them to authorities basically doing their legwork for them in tracking down these criminals.
They have motivation to do it too, its their systems that are most often affected by these criminals, so they are being uncannily pro-active about it.
It's the rare sight of corporate Ame
When are they going to arrest... (Score:5, Insightful)
... the Windows development team for allowing such a security swiss cheese of an operating system to escape from the lab and the marketing team for trying to sell to innocent consumers?
Re:When are they going to arrest... (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't almost every single instance of Android malware a Trojan? In the case of Windows, for years a large percentage was drive-by exploits of IE, ActiveX, and just about every other part of the system.
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Are you still going on about pre-Vista Windows? Let it go man, let it go.
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Can't speek to OS X but Android is so brain damaged as to not look much like Unix/Linux at all.
Actually, Android's security model is much better than the traditional Unix security model. The traditional Unix model is that the program is the user and has the same permission as if the user were manually doing the operation him/herself. This was designed in the 1970s when all users were coders, and makes no sense today when people download untrusted code from the Internet on a regular basis. Android's securi
su and then rm -rf / (Score:2)
How come the "Superior UNIX design" that have lead to tens of thousands of +5 Insightful Slashdot posts over the years doesn't protect Android and OS X?
UNIX does nothing to stop the owner of a computer system from wiping out all files by doing su and then rm -rf / or similar. There are only two ways to stop a device's owner from doing that: education, or taking administrative privileges away from the device's owner.
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They can't.. it's called "Job Security" for the digital crimes unit.
"remarkable success" (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean how they play whack-a-mole with botnets and claim victory when they accidentally hit one, but stay curiously mum when the very same botnet pops up again only two weeks later?
N'mind that they've been criminally lax in improving their software, creating a very easily planted very fertile ground for an entire flora and fauna of malware to grow and prosper in the first place. They created this "ecosystem" on a much grander scale than this "remarkable success" in taking down little pieces of it, for a short while.
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N'mind that they've been criminally lax in improving their software
They have added Secure Boot support in Windows 8 to precisely combat undetectable malware, yet we have people blaming them for it.
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Because what was wanted was to prevent drive by installs and that sort of thing. Secure boot is a whole other kettle of fish.
It is about letting MS and the MPAA own your machine, security is only a side effect.
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Um...yeah...perhaps you've never heard of 'iOS jailbreaking"? Seriously, even with MS vetted drivers (a mandatory part of 64-bit Windows), almost entirely non-Admin user programs (because of how Windows is designed, there are a handful of MS programs that run at higher privilege to provide the Win32/64 environemnt
Windows RT (Score:2)
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Yet Apple gets a free pass on iPads, same with firms such as Motorola. How much is WindowsRT selling and how much of a threat is it to freedom compared to the iPad?
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Yet Apple gets a free pass on iPads
Since when?
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You mean like this [fbi.gov]?
Ever heard of a private eye? (Score:2)
I was going to say (Score:4, Funny)
that the great digital crime of recent note was Windows 8, but I've been beaten to the punch, several times already.
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Who needs shills when your competition has been diligently chumming the water in which they live for a decade or two? Microsoft has earned its hatred in this industry, one pissed off user at a time. To pretend this entirely predictable reaction is the work of shills only betrays your own allegiance and paid for status...
Hmmm (Score:2)