Microsoft is quietly fighting a clever war against Russian hacking group Fancy Bear.

While the White House mulls striking up a joint cyber program with Russia, an unlikely vigilante is taking care of business. As the Daily Beast reports, Microsoft has been waging a quiet war against the hacking entity known as Fancy Bear, which is believed to be associated with the GRU, Russia’s covert military intelligence agency.

The Daily Beast details how, in 2016, Microsoft’s legal team sued Fancy Bear (also known by many other aliases) for reserving domain names that violated Microsoft trademarks. Apparently, in the course of claiming generic domains for its operations, Fancy Bear often selected domains that riff off of Microsoft products and services, inadvertently opening the door to the lawsuit.

While you can’t exactly drag an amorphous, faceless hacking group into court, the lawsuit served one key purpose: it hijacked some of Fancy Bear’s servers. In the last year, Microsoft has taken over at least 70 different Fancy Bear domains, many of which served as “command-and-control” points so the hackers could communicate with the malware they installed on targeted computers.

When a domain flips over into Microsoft’s hands, the company can use it to observe and map Fancy Bear’s server network, which communicates with the Microsoft domains. The result is that the company can indirectly disrupt and observe aspects of a suspected foreign intelligence operation — a pretty clever trick for a tech company to pull off in its spare time.

More@ https://www.technapping.com

Source: Techcrunch

Comments

Walmart expands its grocery delivery business, powered by Uber

Walmart is expanding a test of its grocery delivery service, powered by Uber, the company announced this week. The retailer is now offering grocery delivery in two new markets — Dallas and Orlando — which join Tampa and Phoenix as locations where consumers can shop online for grocery items, then opt to have them come to their home for an additional $9.95 fee. Grocery delivery has been something Walmart has experimented with for years, starting with tests in Denver and San Jose of grocery delivery using its own service and trucks. The tests involving Uber are newer, however. In June, 2016, Walmart began a trial in Phoenix, which expanded to Tampa this March. In those locations, Walmart offers grocery delivery at five local stores per market. This week’s Dallas test is larger, with 8 stores participating. In Orlando, there are four stores involved. The grocery delivery service is available via the same online grocery shopping website where customers can place their pick-up orders — a s...

This 23-year-old just closed her second fund — which is focused on aging — with $22 million

Laura Deming is not your typical venture capitalist. Then again, she isn’t typical in many ways. For starters, the 23-year-old, New Zealand native was home schooled, developing along the way a love of math and physics and, perhaps most interestingly, the biology of aging. In fact, she became so preoccupied with the latter that at age 11, Deming wrote to Cynthia Kenyon , a renowned molecular biologist who specializes in the genetics of aging, asking if she could visit Kenyon’s San Francisco lab during a family trip to the Bay Area. Kenyon said yes. When, soon after the visit, Deming asked if she could work in the lab, Kenyon said yes again. Deming’s family moved to the U.S. to make it possible, and it’s highly doubtful they regret the decision. Indeed, by age 14, Deming was a student at MIT, and two years after that — at the tender age of 16 — she was a college drop-out, having been accepted into Peter Thiel’s two-year-old Thiel Fellowship program, which gives $100,000 to young people ...

Lilium, a German company building an electric ‘air taxi,’ makes key hires from Gett, Airbus and Tesla

Left to right: VP of Production Dirk Gebser, Head of Recruitment Meggy Sailer, CCO Dr. Remo Gerber and co-founder CEO Daniel Wiegand Lilium is almost as ambitious as European startups come. The Munich-based company is developing an all-electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) jet, which it hopes will one day power an on-demand “air taxi” service, arguably making flying cars a reality. And although it’s still early days — the two-seater Lilium Jet prototype only took its first public (and successful) test flight in April — the startup is announcing a number of key hires from notable companies in the transportation space. They are Dr. Remo Gerber, former MD for Western Europe at Gett, who joins Lilium as chief commercial officer; Dirk Gebser, who takes up the position of VP of Production and previously held manufacturing executive roles at Airbus and Rolls Royce; and Meggy Sailer, who joined Lilium as Head of Recruitment in February and was formerly Tesla’s Head of Talent EMEA. (...

Technapping

Search This Blog