Detecting Fraud in MS Azure Cloud Service Hanan Shteingart Technion Lecture

Detecting Fraud in MS Azure Cloud Service by Hanan Shteingart of Microsoft R&D
Lecture at Technion Computer Engineering 2014 Summer School.
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. It provides both Platform and Infrastructure as a Service services and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems. MS Azure becomes more popular, slowly gaining on Amazon Web Services. However, this cloud platform is also being abused by cyber-criminals doing nasty things such as bit-coin mining, spamming, phishing etc. The Azure cyber security team is a new team in Microsoft Israel R&D (Herzeliya) founded in 2014 and led by ex-CEO of RSA Israel. This team aim is to build automated tools to detect these malicious usage by utilizing machine learning methods. We use internal Microsoft big data platform to digest large amount of data, extract features and run machine learning algorithms on them. In this talk I will present our strategy, results as well as give a taste of some practicalities, focusing on fraud detection.