How Azure helps Microsoft take down cyber criminals

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

In mid-November, Microsoft unveiled a facility on its Redmond, Wash., campus that had become the new home for its Digital Crimes Unit. It took the opportunity to offer up new details about the multi-agency initiative that disrupted the huge Citadel botnet earlier this year. What Microsoft hasn’t yet talked much about is the role the cloud played in the Citadel project and how the cloud enables the company to tackle cyber crime. I had a chance to hear more about it from Richard Boscovich, assistant general counsel for Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, this week.

The Digital Crimes Unit has some dedicated hardware on-premises, although Boscovich revealed only a few specifics. “We do in fact use quite a lot of storage power, a lot of compute power,” he said. “We have a Hadoop cluster on SQL server and a parallel data warehouse right here on-premises. We’re talking terabytes of storage.”…

Still, that’s not always enough. “Even with that, we have to go to the cloud to get some more capacity when we do some of these take downs,” he said. “One interesting aspect of being able to scale in the cloud is you’re able to provision computers or virtual servers quickly, without the need of having hardware here in the DCU. We leveraged that ability of scalability in the recent takedown of Citadel,” he said…

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