Microsoft Botnet-hunting Tool Helps Bust Hackers

Set up a plant that spews forth hundreds of tons of toxic waste every day, then sell cleanup and healthcare products.

Quoting: Although Microsoft is reluctant to give out details on its botnet buster -- the company said that even revealing its name could give cyber criminals a clue on how to thwart it -- ... Microsoft security experts analyze samples of malicious code to capture a snapshot of what is happening on the botnet network, which can then be used by law enforcers, Cranton said. "They can actually get into the software code and say, 'Here's information on how it's being controlled.'"

Sounds like some Microsoftie discovered Wireshark.

Wait a minit...So MS builds some sort of system into Windows Defender that relays information to them when a machine get infected, which they then analyze and pass on to the government... So what's to stop them from using Windows Defender to collect all sorts of other information about your doings and report anything "suspicious" you do? Sniff your emails? Documents? Web activity?

"Machine at X IP with Y MAC address and Z Windows License number has reported that user logged on as Bob visited the BackTrack Linux site, this person is a possible terrorist and should be investigated.

(not that they couldn't do this with Windows already....)

So they probably added user activity monitoring to WGA. What's the big deal?

@jhansonxi:

Quoting:user activity monitoring

Do you really want Microsoft knowing how long you had Word open, how many sentences you typed on it, how many times you typed your network share password until you got it right, how many bytes you transferred over your home network, how many copies you printed, how many pr0n sites you visited, and how long you took between clicks in IE6?

Even if you don't care about Microsoft knowing these things about you, do you want the government knowing them, too?

Quoting:Sounds like some Microsoftie discovered Wireshark.

Sounds like some Microsoftie discovered project honeypot and decided all their "customers" should participate.

Hoo boy...............