Microsoft has honed its strategy to disrupt global cybercrime and state-backed actors.
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    Over the past decade, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) has forged its own strategies, both technical and legal, to investigate scams, take down criminal infrastructure, and block malicious traffic.

    But 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.

    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.me.

    As the group’s mission came into focus while dealing with threats from the late 2000s and early 2010s—like the widespread Conficker worm—the DCU’s unorthodox and aggressive approach drew criticism at times for its fallout and potential impacts on legitimate businesses and websites.

    In the mid-2000s, Krumm says, Brad Smith, now Microsoft’s vice chair and president, was a driving force in turning the company’s attention toward the threat of email spam.

    I remember all of a sudden, it was like, ‘We have to do something about spam.’ Brad comes to the team and he’s like, ‘OK, guys, let’s put together a strategy.’ I’ll never forget that it was just, ‘Now we’re going to focus here.’ And that has continued, whether it be moving into the malware space, whether it be tech support fraud, online child exploitation, business email compromise.”

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