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Federal prosecutors indicted a Nebraska man on charges he perpetrated a cryptojacking scheme that defrauded two cloud providers—one based in Seattle and the other in Redmond, Washington—out of $3.5 million.

The indictment , filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of New York and unsealed on Monday, charges Charles O. Parks III—45 of Omaha, Nebraska—with wire fraud, money laundering, and engaging in unlawful monetary transactions in connection with the scheme. Parks has yet to enter a plea and is scheduled to make an initial appearance in federal court in Omaha on Tuesday. Parks was arrested last Friday.

Prosecutors allege that Parks defrauded “two well-known providers of cloud computing services” of more than $3.5 million in computing resources to mine cryptocurrency. The indictment says the activity was in furtherance of a cryptojacking scheme, a term for crimes that generate digital coin through the acquisition of computing resources and electricity of others through fraud, hacking, or other illegal means.

Enlarge / If you have a bunch of Windows systems, Microsoft now has an app for that. It's called "Windows App." Microsoft just has a certain way with naming things. (credit: Microsoft)

It feels strange to say it, but it's true: There is an app called, simply, "Windows." It's available for early testing on Mac, iOS and iPad, the web, Windows, and eventually Android, and it's made by Microsoft. The fact that it exists, with such a strong and simple name, says something larger than the rather plain and starting-stage app it is now.

"Windows App," as named by Microsoft in a rare bit of minimalism, is essentially a convenient remote desktop connection to a Windows OS on a physical system, an Azure virtual desktop, a Dev Box, or elsewhere. There are some other tricks you can pull off, too, like using your local device's webcam, speakers, and printer connections with your remote Windows system. But you can easily read a "Windows app" for multiple platforms, including web browsers generally, as being the next step in Microsoft's slow march toward making a virtual Windows OS something that seems convenient for everybody, whether on a business or personal account.

At the moment, you need a work or school account with Microsoft to use most of the features beyond a traditional remote desktop connection. To use a remote desktop connection, the Windows instance you're connecting to must be running a Pro edition, as Home lacks the ability to host a remote desktop connection. There are, of course, many ways to connect to a remote PC from nearly any device, including RealVNC and others.

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Microsoft said the corporate account of one of its engineers was hacked by a highly skilled threat actor that acquired a signing key used to hack dozens of Azure and Exchange accounts belonging to high-profile users.

The disclosure solves two mysteries at the center of a disclosure Microsoft made in July . The company said that hackers tracked as Storm-0558 had been inside its corporate network for more than a month and had gained access to Azure and Exchange accounts, several of which were later identified as belonging to the US Departments of State and Commerce. Storm-0558 pulled off the feat by obtaining an expired Microsoft account consumer signing key and using it to forge tokens for Microsoft’s supposedly fortified Azure AD cloud service.

The disclosure left two of the most important questions unanswered. Specifically, how was a credential as sensitive as the consumer signing key stolen from Microsoft’s network, and how could it sign tokens for Azure, which is built on an entirely different infrastructure?

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A US senator is calling on the Justice Department to hold Microsoft responsible for “negligent cybersecurity practices” that enabled Chinese espionage hackers to steal hundreds of thousands of emails from cloud customers, including officials in the US Departments of State and Commerce.

“Holding Microsoft responsible for its negligence will require a whole-of-government effort,” Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote in a letter . It was sent on Thursday to the heads of the Justice Department, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the Federal Trade Commission.

Bending over backward

Wyden’s remarks echo those of other critics who say Microsoft is withholding key details about a recent hack. In disclosures involving the incident so far, Microsoft has bent over backwards to avoid saying its infrastructure—including the Azure Active Directory , a supposedly fortified part of Microsoft’s cloud offerings that large organizations use to manage single sign-on and multifactor authentication—was breached. The critics have said that details Microsoft has disclosed so far lead to the inescapable conclusion that vulnerabilities in code for Azure AD and other cloud offerings were exploited to pull off the successful hack.

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On Friday, Microsoft attempted to explain the cause of a breach that gave hackers working for the Chinese government access to the email accounts of 25 of its customers—reportedly including the US Departments of State and Commerce and other sensitive organizations.

In a post on Friday , the company indicated that the compromise resulted from three exploited vulnerabilities in either its Exchange Online email service or Azure Active Directory , an identity service that manages single sign-on and multifactor authentication for large organizations. Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence team said that Storm-0558, a China-based hacking outfit that conducts espionage on behalf of that country’s government, exploited them starting on May 15. Microsoft drove out the attackers on June 16 after a customer tipped off company researchers of the intrusion.

Above all else: Avoid the Z-word

In standard parlance among security professionals, this means that Storm-0558 exploited zero-days in the Microsoft cloud services. A “zero-day” is a vulnerability that is known to or exploited by outsiders before the vendor has a patch for it. “Exploit” means using code or other means to trigger a vulnerability in a way that causes harm to the vendor or others.

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The UK’s communications watchdog has called for a probe into Microsoft and Amazon’s dominance of the country’s cloud computing market in the latest challenge to the tech giants from global regulators.

Ofcom said on Wednesday it was “particularly concerned” by the practices of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, which together control between 60 and 70 per cent of the UK cloud market. It has proposed referring the sector to the Competition and Markets Authority for further investigation.

Cloud computing is dominated by Amazon and Microsoft, and has become a crucial driver of revenue at the tech giants.

Enlarge / The OpenAI logo superimposed over the Microsoft logo. (credit: Ars Technica)

On Monday, AI tech darling OpenAI announced that it received a "multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment" from Microsoft, following previous investments in 2019 and 2021. While the two companies have not officially announced a dollar amount on the deal, the news follows rumors of a $10 billion investment that emerged two weeks ago.

Founded in 2015, OpenAI has been behind several key technologies that made 2022 the year that generative AI went mainstream, including DALL-E image synthesis, the ChatGPT chatbot (powered by GPT-3 ), and GitHub Copilot for programming assistance. ChatGPT, in particular, has made Google reportedly "panic" to craft a response, while Microsoft has reportedly been working on integrating OpenAI's language model technology into its Bing search engine.

“The past three years of our partnership have been great,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in a Microsoft news release . “Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone.”