Microsoft partners with financial services industry on fight against cybercrime

Members of the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit work in a forensics lab in the Cybercrime Center.
Members of the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit work in a forensics lab in the Cybercrime Center.

The tools of the trade for bank robbers have evolved from ski masks and getaway cars. Today’s thieves quietly lurk in the shadows of cyberspace where they employ computer code to target banks, businesses and customers to make off with millions of dollars without ever cracking a safe.

We actually know this firsthand from our work with the FBI to disrupt the Citadel botnet, which cybercriminals deployed to infect thousands of computers to steal banking information and identities from unwitting victims. More recently, we worked with law enforcement in the United Kingdom to disrupt the Caphaw botnet, which targeted banks and their customers in Europe.

The most critical component of our efforts to thwart cybercriminals online is deep partnerships with law enforcement and industry partners. A key ally in this fight is the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), the global financial industry’s go-to resource for cyber and physical threat intelligence analysis and sharing. That’s why I’m pleased today to announce a new collaboration with the FS-ISAC to share cyber-threat intelligence, free of charge, to better protect our mutual customers and partners.

Through this pilot program, Microsoft will make its Cyber Threat Intelligence Program feed available to participating FS-ISAC members, which will receive near real-time information on known malware infections affecting more than 67 million unique IP address. With this information, FS-ISAC members will be able to quickly identify infected computers on their networks and clean them of malware, through an automated, confidential and secure feed distributed via the cloud with Microsoft Azure.

This collaboration will provide valuable intelligence into the global threat landscape affecting the financial services industry, including distributed denial of service attacks and financial botnet attacks. Together, we’ll be able to better protect FS-ISAC’s members and Microsoft customers from cyber-threats.

For more on how Microsoft is combatting cybercrime, check out this blog post. Additional information about Microsoft at Sibos can be found here.