Governments and the tech industry around the world have been scrambling in recent years to curb the rise of online scamming and cybercrime.
Even with progress on digital defenses, enforcement, and deterrence, the ransomware attacks, business email compromises, and malware infections keep on coming.
Over the past decade, Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit has forged its own strategies, both technical and legal, to investigate scams, take down criminal infrastructure, and block malicious traffic.
The DCU is fueled, of course, by Microsoft's massive scale and the visibility across the internet that comes from the reach of Windows.
DCU team members repeatedly told WIRED that their work is motivated by very personal goals of protecting victims rather than a broad policy agenda or corporate mandate.
In just its latest action, the DCU announced Wednesday evening efforts to disrupt a cybercrime group that Microsoft calls Storm-1152.
A middleman in the criminal ecosystem, Storm-1152 sells software services and tools like identity verification bypass mechanisms to other cybercriminals.
The group has grown into the number one creator and vendor of fake Microsoft accounts-creating roughly 750 million scam accounts that the actor has sold for millions of dollars.
The DCU used legal techniques it has honed over many years related to protecting intellectual property to move against Storm-1152.
The team obtained a court order from the Southern District of New York on December 7 to seize some of the criminal group's digital infrastructure in the US and take down websites including the services 1stCAPTCHA, AnyCAPTCHA, and NoneCAPTCHA, as well as a site that sold fake Outlook accounts called Hotmailbox.
This Cyber News was published on www.wired.com. Publication date: Thu, 14 Dec 2023 17:43:06 +0000