“We can see that only 5 percent of your sales have Office attached to Windows,” Mr. Delaney says. “If that’s below the average for the area, we may go have a chat or conduct a test purchase.”
This rather eclectic bunch is joined by about 75 other people, including former agents of the I.R.S., F.B.I., Secret Service and Interpol, and former prosecutors — all of whom work under Mr. Finn.
A former assistant United States attorney in New York, Mr. Finn directs this squad from a Paris office. He says Microsoft spends “north of $10 million” a year on its intelligence-gathering operations and an estimated $200 million on developing anti-piracy technology.
Mr. Finn talks at length about Microsoft’s need to refine the industry’s equivalent of fingerprinting, DNA testing and ballistics through CD and download forensics that can prove a software fake came from a particular factory or person. And his eyes widen as he thinks about advancing this technology to the point that Microsoft can emphasize the piracy issue directly to customers.
Imagine the day when a consumer finds a link that says, ‘Click here if you would like a forensic examination of your disk, Mr. Finn says. “You put the disk in, the computer reads it and suddenly you see a map of everywhere that counterfeit has been seen all over the world. If people see it in a graphic and visual way, I think they are more likely to help.”
THE software thieves monitored by Microsoft come in various shapes and sizes.
College students, grandmothers and others have been found selling cheap, copied versions of software like Windows, Office, Adobe’s Photoshop and Symantec’s security software on eBay and other shopping Web sites.
And people unwilling to pay for discounted software, meanwhile, can find free versions of popular products online that offer downloads to all manner of copyrighted material.
Microsoft’s investigators, however, spend much of their time examining how large-scale counterfeiters produce copies at factories and then distribute their wares around the globe.
The biggest counterfeit software bust in history occurred in July 2007 in southern China. The Public Security Bureau there and the F.B.I. found a warehouse where workers assembled disks, authentication materials and manuals and prepared them for shipping. All told, investigators found $2 billion worth of counterfeit Microsoft software, including 19 versions of products in 11 languages. Software produced by this syndicate turned up in 36 countries on six continents.
As one means of trying to tell the genuine article from a fake, Microsoft embeds about an inch of a special type of thread in each “certificate of authenticity” sticker found on boxes of software and computers. The investigators spotted dozens of spools of counterfeit thread 81 miles worth at the Chinese warehouse.
Microsoft has found that operations of this scale tend to include all the trappings of legitimate businesses. Workers spend years building up contacts at software resellers around the globe, offering them discounted versions of software. Then they take the orders and send them off via shipping services, Mr. Keating says.
Many Microsoft products make users enter an activation code to register the software and have it work properly. The syndicates trade in stolen versions of these codes as well, and sometimes set up their own online authentication systems to give people the feeling they have a legitimate product. Groups in Russia and Eastern Europe, with various cybercrime operations in play, now use money gained from credit card fraud schemes to buy activation codes.
About a decade ago, only a few companies had the expertise or the $10 million needed to buy machines that could press CDs and DVDs. Today, someone can spend about $100,000 to buy second-hand pressing gear, says Patrick Corbett, the managing director at a CD plant owned by Arvato Digital Services, which produces Microsoft’s retail software in Europe.
“Just five years ago, there were five sites in China that supplied the whole country,” Mr. Corbett says. “Now these machines are commonplace.”
source:nytimes
