Microsoft has forged a partnership with 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 – to help fight cybercrime.

The partnership was announced at Sibos and will see Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) – an international team comprised of more than 90 attorneys, investigators, forensic analysts and business professionals – share crucial cyber-threat intelligence with FS-ISAC as part of a pilot programme.

FS-ISAC will get access to near real-time information on known malware infections affecting more than 67 million unique IP address from DCU’s Cyber Threat Intelligence Program (C-TIP) feed. 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.

“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,” said Richard Domingues Boscovich, assistant general counsel of Microsoft’s DCU. “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.”

This is not the first time that Microsoft has collaborated with law enforcement and industry partners to thwart cybercriminals online. Last year it worked with the FBI to disrupt the Citadel botnet, which cybercriminals deployed to infect thousands of computers and steal banking information and identities from unwitting victims. More recently, Microsoft has worked with law enforcement in the UK to take down Caphaw – a botnet that targeted banks and their customers in Europe.

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