Fostering innovation for global security challenges

The INTERPOL World 2015 is being held at the Sands Expo & Convention Centre in Singapore from April 14 to 16.

During many years, in an attempt to fix the complex threats to multi- jurisdictional cybersecurity issues, Microsoft has been co-working with many strategic partners worldwide in diversified sectors. Microsoft Cyber Crime Centers study and distribute the advice regarding to malware, digital forensic and approach to combat cybercrime.

At the INTERPOL World 2015, Keshav Dhakad, senior attorney and regional director, Digital Crime Unit (DCU), Microsoft Asia, presented the session named: “Fighting Cybercrime – Effective Collaborations by Bridging Private Sector Efficiencies and Global Law Enforcement Ecosystem”. The session enhanced the rapid rise of Cybercrime at a global scale, becoming a multi-billion dollar industry, causing enormous amount of disruption and financial losses. Particularly, malware facilitated crimes are having the most devastating impact on businesses, government and individuals.

As a leading global IT solution provider, Microsoft takes the impact of cybercrime very seriously. Global Microsoft DCU team, through global public-private partnerships, targets cyber-criminal organisations that are making illegal profits by spreading vicious malware infections.

The said public-private partnerships has led to effective global disruption of botnets in the past many years and has been liberating millions of infected devices at a global level, involving international, regional and local law enforcement bodies, government cybersecurity agencies, industry bodies, security firms, universities, hardware manufacturers and internet services providers.

In this global collaboration, DCU’s Cyber Crime Center contributes by way of bringing in legal, big-data, security and technical expertise to enable those investigations and operations.

Dhakad’s presentation at the INTERPOL World 2015 also highlighted some of the key case studies of such global public-private partnership and cyber threat-intelligence sharing and collaboration. And recently is Simda botnet, which INTERPOL coordinated global operations to take down.

In a series of simultaneous actions around the world, on April 9, 10 command and control servers were seized in the Netherlands, with additional servers taken down in the US, Russia, Luxembourg and Poland. Microsoft’s DCU provided forensic intelligence to INTERPOL and other partners after its big data analysis found a sharp increase in Simda infections around the world.

Microsoft has developed a free cleaning agent for Simda. If organisations or individuals have been infected by Simda.AT, run a comprehensive scan of your environment using Microsoft Safety Scanner, Microsoft Security Essentials or Windows Defender.