[ISN] Microsoft's Superhero Cyber Crime Fighting Unit

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/03/microsofts-superhero-cyber-crime-fighting-unit/50318/

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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