Craig Schmidt was talking about botnets, almost matter-of-factly. A botnet is a collection of compromised computers connected to the Internet. Schmidt is the senior manager of investigation of Microsoft's digital crimes unit. And, besides the fact that Schmidt grew up in Spring Lake Park, what do botnets have to do with Anoka County?
Quite a bit, actually.
Members of the Anoka County attorney and sheriff's offices -- considered local pioneers in the investigation of cyber crime and the use of computer forensics -- met recently with investigative and crime specialists from Microsoft. The two-day closed conference at Anoka-Ramsey Community College in Coon Rapids offered strategies in fighting modern crimes with modern technology.
Topics included e-mail header analysis, social networking, instant messaging, steganography (writing hidden messages), basic encryption, anonymization techniques, Internet service providers and domain name systems. These are topics that many law enforcement officials might never have approached 10 years ago. But for a video-game-playing, text-messaging generation that has grown up wearing ear buds and considers a cellphone to be the modern-day pocket watch, using all this technology is as natural as breathing.
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