When establishing the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, the company’s mission statement was, “to make the Internet safer for every person and organization on the planet.” Since its induction, the MDCU has partnered with several businesses and law enforcement agencies to work towards achieving a safer Internet for all.
As the incidents of malware and cyber crimes such as online fraud, identity theft, and sexual exploitation increase, the MDCU continues to evolve its practices and techniques. Part the MDCU’s evolution includes tapping into (ironically) the Microsoft Cloud.
According to Tom Burt of the Digital Crimes Unit, “Using our advanced analytics tools, analysis that used to take days to run, we can now see in real-time, and we’re building what we learn back into the cloud, to make people and organizations safer.”
While the most recent success story resulted in the MDCU assisting law enforcement agencies in stopping a sophisticated Win32/Dorkbot malware attack to millions of computers worldwide, the MDCU is tirelessly working on new approaches to online security.
Other recent MDCU inspired improvements include Microsoft’s PhotoDNA Cloud Service that’s intended to help keep the internet safer for children by allowing online services such as Facebook, Google, Twitter and Flipboard to filter out offensive or images regarding children.
Microsoft’s push into the utilizing ‘big data’ and the cloud seems to not only benefits businesses seeking a relatively viable end to end solution when analyzing data, but the company is using those same vast resources to help improve the much broader Internet as whole. Will the Internet ever really be rid of security risk and online pitfalls? Probably not, but Microsoft along with the help of other influential Internet invested organizations partnered with local and federal law enforcement agencies might make navigating it just a tad bit easier.
