Gadgetory

at crime scenes detectives search for evidence like fingerprints or DNA for cyber sleuth the hunt for clues starts with the weapon malicious software viruses that can steal people's passwords there are personal information drain their bank accounts at the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit in Washington State a team of engineers lawyers investigators and analysts use computer forensic techniques to deconstruct and understand how the malware works that means that we inject a malware within a clean computer to see the behaviors kind of every Maldor leaves a digital footprints on the computer they look for changes in the infected computer security settings update options and even additional screens asking users for banking and financial information in addition to username and password deciphering the malware can take hours or months some of them could be automated however others we have to look at manually review them code by code line by line Microsoft then works with financial institutions and law enforcement and a case known as Citadel Microsoft helped pinpoint the Eastern European cyber criminals who robbed more than 5 million people worldwide a five hundred million dollars this map shows the infected computers if you look at this map you will see a clear differential between Western Europe and Eastern Europe and that stops really at the border it's almost like a mal riveted GPS built into it the software giant also investigates software piracy and not only because it hurts their bottom line what we're seeing is one of the main ways that the criminals are transmitting their malicious software is through pirated software to help fight the spread of child pornography online Microsoft at Dartmouth researchers developed photo DNA the technology establishes a digital hash a unique signature for each photograph let's say this photo of me is a node illegal image that's about to be uploaded to the internet again the photo DNA software skills for matches to see if it can find the original photo and match it up against the one that has just been uploaded and and that has been found crime lab technology trying to stay one click ahead of the criminals in redmond washington i'm cara Tsuboi cnet.com for CBS News