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Inside the Microsoft team tracking the world's most dangerous hackers
From: InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>
Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2019 08:19:39 +0000 (UTC)
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614646/inside-the-microsoft-team-tracking-the-worlds-most-dangerous-hackers/ By Patrick Howell O'Neill MIT Technology Review November 6, 2019When the Pentagon recently awarded Microsoft a $10 billion contract to transform and host the US military’s cloud computing systems, the mountain of money came with an implicit challenge: Can Microsoft keep the Pentagon’s systems secure against some of the most well-resourced, persistent, and sophisticated hackers on earth?
“They’re under assault every hour of the day,” says James Lewis, vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Microsoft’s latest win over cloud rival Amazon for the ultra-lucrative military contact means that an intelligence-gathering apparatus among the most important in the world is based in the woods outside Seattle. These kinds of national security responsibilities once sat almost exclusively in Washington, DC. Now in this corner of Washington state, dozens of engineers and intelligence analysts are dedicated to watching and stopping the government-sponsored hackers proliferating around the world.
Members of the so-called MSTIC (Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center) team are threat-focused: one group is responsible for Russian hackers code-named Strontium, another watches North Korean hackers code-named Zinc, and yet another tracks Iranian hackers code-named Holmium. MSTIC tracks over 70 code-named government-sponsored threat groups and many more that are unnamed.
The rain started just before I arrived on a typical fall day in Redmond, Washington. It kept coming down for my entire visit. Microsoft headquarters is as vast and labyrinthine as any government installation, with hundreds of buildings and thousands of employees. I’d come to meet the Microsoft team that tracks the world’s most dangerous hackers.
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