> Microsoft provided the FBI with the history of IP addresses tied to that specific GDID.
This article, and most articles about this, doesn't explain where FBI got that GDID from. Ok, Microsoft has a list of IP addresses that has been used by a computer with a certain GDID, but FBI needs to get the GDID in the first place, and then try to bind that to a person.
I found another article that explains the process a bit better:
> Stokes got caught because he used the same Windows device for everything, and the GDID stitched all of it back together after the fact.
> Scattered Spider members phoned the jewelry retailer’s IT help desk from Google Voice numbers, posed as locked out employees, and talked support staff into resetting three accounts, two with administrator privileges. From there they installed a tunneling tool called ngrok to get past the retailer’s network defenses, moved roughly 77 gigabytes of data to Amazon cloud storage using ngrok [...]
> Investigators later subpoenaed ngrok and found the account used in the attack had been created on May 12, 2025, at 19:21 UTC from a VPN proxy IP address run by Tzulo, a hosting provider. The IP was a dead end. VPN proxies do that. But the GDID is built different.
> Microsoft’s records showed that at that exact same minute, a Windows device carrying GDID g:6755467234350028 had visited the ngrok signup page. Three hours later, the same GDID visited the retailer’s own website, through the same Tzulo proxy address used to set up the ngrok account. It gave the FBI a device, that don’t rotate the way VPN exit nodes do.
https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/07/10/you-cant-fully-disa...
Although this doesn't explain where Microsoft got that traffic data from. How do Microsoft know which sites a computer visit?
> Microsoft has a list of IP addresses that has been used by a computer with a certain GDID, but FBI needs to get the GDID in the first place
What they did was the opposite: ask Microsoft for GDIDs used by attacker-associated IPs within several 24-hour time periods during which attack-related activity took place. Windows pings Microsoft regularly with the GDID, establishing links between your GDID and any IP addresses you use. The IP logs from Microsoft and the VPS provider showed at least 10 instances where a single VPN IP accessed the attacker's VPS and also pinged Microsoft with at least one GDID within a 24-hour period. They found a constant GDID that all instances shared. This seems to have been the most damning GDID-related evidence in the DOJ complaint [1] and yet it wasn't mentioned in the article you linked (or any other articles about this I've seen pop up on HN). It includes the diagram from the complaint (page 18) that outlines this, but devoid of context. The ngrok stuff that the article focuses on was just the cherry on top and was discussed later in the complaint.
What also becomes clear when you read the complaint is that the GDID was just one piece of the puzzle and that they had plenty of other evidence. Attacker-associated IPs were used to access the suspect's Apple, Snapchat, and Facebook accounts, at least one of which was his actual residential IP, not a VPN IP. Once they had revealed the identity of the person who owned these accounts, they were able to all-but-confirm that this was in fact the attacker.
What remains unclear even after reading the complaint is how they were so sure that the GDID they obtained visited specific websites, but honestly, at that point, they were already drowning in evidence, so I don't know if it matters that much. It could be as simple as "he was signed into Edge with his Microsoft account and had sync enabled".
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndil/media/1450651/dl?inline
Wait, so it would have, ironically, been safer to allow microsoft telemetry to bypass the VPN entirely and remain associated only with their home network, because it's the phone home to microsoft tunneled through the VPN that tied together all their IP addresses to a single microsoft account. The GDID itself is almost a red herring, as it could have been a session id or username or something only long lived enough to appear comming from several ip addresses to windows update request?
They make the default web browser on Windows, and that sends your browsing data if you don't disable its telemetry.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48921595
This seems like something that should be easy to confirm, but I haven't seen anyone do it. Do they keep a database of every website visit all Edge users make?
Speculation: if you turn on browser sync so you can have your open tabs and history on different computers, that stuff will be on MS' cloud with your consent, with whatever E2EE they have or claim to have.
But it would be very foolish for a blackhat to turn on browser sync...
I got banned from all computers in my secondary school and from taking the IT GCSE; final school exam in the UK.
Using the school news paper shared account, I copied the bullies coursework in to the public share, made changes to the coursework on my own user account and then copied it back to their work folder using the school news papers account.
MS Office keeps an "Last edited by" field so I got caught. If I had used the school newspaper account to make the edit I wouldn't of been caught. Rookie error. I too discovered a DCOM in the Windows 98 help file that revealed all the hidden shares on the network which scared the school. This was 2004 and I was 15.
Oh and the time, I bought a BB gun off someone at school. I was a librarian in the schools library and showed it off someone of the older grade year. The head librarian confiscated it and reported it to the headmaster. The guy then gave me a copy of Q3A and I stuck with violence the video-game way.
The question you should be asking is: why would Microsoft not do this?
I’m a fan of technical facts coming from technical analysis, not armchair speculation about motives.
Well for one it is illegal in the EU at least, not that Microsoft or other U.S tech giants care about laws.
GDPR compliance.
Not in the US, of course.
They didn’t. They went to ngrok and asked for all the data at the point of signup. They then looked to find the any of that data at the second site. In this case they had two identical data points - the GDID and the IP address.
What do you mean? The FBI could know that this VPN ip visited ngrok and then the retailer website, but how would it know that that ip was associated with the specific GDID unless microsoft was tracking (timestamp,website,gdid) tuples?
Probably Windows constantly pings the MS server and they record those tuples.
It's called telemetry. It means Windows sends data back to Microsoft about what you're doing.
Have some light reading:
"required" spyware: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/required-d...
"optional" (but on by default) spyware: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/optional-d...
This is my favorite:
None of this matters really.
This criminal mastermind got caught because he did everything but sign his name to the crimes while holding two pieces of government identification in presence of a notary.
The FBI did the bare minimum in terms of old-fashioned detective work, and correlated evidence from various sources.
The obsession with GDID is a complete nothing-burger and I'm tired of seeing it on the front page every other day.
I'd take all of this with a cup of salt due to law enforcement's use of parallel construction in tech cases.
Wouldn't the evidence need to be presented to the defense for scrutiny, and if it turned out to be bunk, that would strongly hurt the state's case?
They claim it was an ngrok account that was used to host an endpoint used in the compromise, tied to a microsoft account / gdid that was passed when ngrok software was downloaded from the "microsoft store".
That wouldn't explain how they connected the GDID to the visit to the retailers website
> Three hours later, the same GDID visited the retailer’s own website, through the same Tzulo proxy address used to set up the ngrok account.