Inside Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit 72
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."
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Why have their been so many Microsoft stories recently? Are they a sponsor?
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(By the way, "their" should have been "there").
The number of aliterates who are visiting slashdot these days astounds me. People who don't read on a nerd site? It's sad how many people here in the last five years or so can't handle homophones, use grocers' apostrophes, and think "lose" and "loose" are synonyms (if the word "synonym is even in their vocabulary).
As to the aliterate's comment, he was right -- just look at this comment. [slashdot.org] A humorous jab at Microsoft's most hated OS ever and he gets modded "troll"
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That comment is currently marked at +5 funny, but I'm confused: isn't Vista the most hated Microsoft "OS"?
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Not any more, W8 surpassed it. Yet another triumph for Microsoft!
I'm surprised that nobody thought "aliterate" was a misspelling of "illiterate". I usually get chuckles from that one, although the last time I did it somebody actually looked it up.
Aliterates at a nerd site annoy me. You're a nerd, you read books. But these guys that don't know their from there from they're, well, to paraphrase Twain, an aliterate has no advantage over an illiterate."
I think I'll make that my sig after Christmas.
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you missed the trailing " on "synonym
not pedantic enough perhaps?
Re: fuck slashdot beta won't autofill the subject (Score:1)
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Talk to my editor, it's his fault.
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(By the way, "their" should have been "there").
The number of aliterates who are visiting slashdot these days astounds me. People who don't read on a nerd site? It's sad how many people here in the last five years or so can't handle homophones, use grocers' apostrophes, and think "lose" and "loose" are synonyms (if the word "synonym is even in their vocabulary).
Frownie face... Believe it or not, when I'm banging out a comment on my phone while on the crapper, I don't act like I'm composing a masterpiece. No need to hate, man.
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That's why I never comment with the phone. That's what the laptop is four; oops, FOR.
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That's troll's getting a little old, son. Better quit now before you lose all your karma... if you have any left.
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I thought the title was about Microsoft's UI design team.
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**waits for McGrew to leave the room and go berate some other young'un, checks the coast is clear and starts looking for another first post to troll**
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+5 funny
Digital Crimes Unit (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Digital Crimes Unit (Score:5, Funny)
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Best Regards, A member of the BSD fanboy fraction.
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Microsoft doesn't have fanboys, Apple does. Microsoft has shills -- nobody but Microsoft employees, computer repairmen, antivirus companies, and MS shareholders have any love at all for Microsoft.
Apple has fans.
Microsoft has shills.
Linux has zealots (I'm one)
If Microsoft didn't suck I wouldn't be using Linux.
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You know, you are probably also a Microsoft shareholder. I'd say practically every retirement/pension fund on earth has Microsoft shares in their portfolio, since they have decent dividends and almost never devalue.
So what does this mean for your original point?
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There seem to be a large number of even remotely anti-Microsoft posts moderated down heavily these days. It's looking very much like they're (still) paying people to hang out on Slashdot and other forums to try to boost their image. It could just be rabid MS fanboys, but that really seems unlikely.
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I was thinking that the Office development team was renamed for few seconds...
Re:Digital Crimes Unit (Score:5, Funny)
I was thinking that the Office development team was renamed for few seconds...
That would be the Special Victims Unit.
Misinterpeted headline (Score:5, Funny)
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.)
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That was true 15 years ago: how do you think Windows NT happened? They hired David Cutler from DEC, and he brought along the guts of VMS.
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Failing that they could always employ apk to fine-tune their hosts file security, and he has plenty of stalking experience already.
Re:If only... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Had they known in '85 how important the (as yet nonexistent) Internet would be, would they have made the same mistakes?
What if Linux was dominant instead? Do you really believe there'd be no malware market?
It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't realise hindsight is always 20/20.
Creating a Solution for a Problem they Created (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
So people or companies shouldn't try to fix problems they created?
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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.
So people or companies shouldn't try to fix problems they created?
Not sure I've heard anyone complaining, other than about the price of Azure services.
It now appears Azure users are picking up the tab for building Microsoft's private bot army which it uses to take down other bot armies. Some of this is good, but you have to assume most of it is self serving. In addition to taking down hackers, we can only guess what else they might be collecting and who else they might be serving.
I won't pay for Azure when I know significant parts of the infrastructure are intended only
Yea ok (Score:1)
"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?
Re:Yea ok (Score:4, Insightful)
"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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
How did this get modded "troll"?
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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.
And why build your own cloud when you can have your users fund it for you. If Microsoft wasn't funneling off resources from Azure for their own pet projects, who much less would it cost the average user?
Law & Order: DCU (Score:2, Funny)
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"Microsoft has a private police force" (Score:2)
When do we get Law and Order:DCU (Score:1)
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only with azure? (Score:2)
yeah yeah yeah, but... (Score:5, Informative)
It's this very business model that we all loathe so.