Tech giant Microsoft (MSFT) fought back against crime recently with word that it joined police in taking on a major cybercrime operation. This operation was actually so large in scale that it ran its own subscription service. And Microsoft’s move to help take it out of the picture left investors feeling satisfied, sending Microsoft shares up fractionally in Thursday afternoon’s trading.
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More specifically, Microsoft took aim at RedVDS, which charged $24 a month to offer access to a set of virtual computers that ran a suite of unlicensed ai-emissions">software tools, including Windows, among others. The cheap RedVDS access allowed users to send phishing emails and conduct a range of other scams from a virtualized environment that left its users substantially difficult to track.
Microsoft joined an international coalition of police agencies, including those in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and beyond to engage in server seizures. This in turn took out the RedVDS marketplace by shutting down the infrastructure on which it ran. Given that RedVDS users together account for about $40 million worth of fraud losses in the United States since March 2025—and more beyond, almost certainly—shutting down RedVDS represented a huge step forward for both Microsoft and the law.
“Safer Gaming”
Gaming, generally speaking, might be one of the safest hobbies. Your only real risk as a gamer is muscle atrophy from sitting too long or heart conditions from a terrible diet of food that can be eaten one-handed. But Microsoft, along with others in the field, is working to make gaming safer from, apparently, harsh language over voice chat functions.
Microsoft offered up a list of things it has been doing of late to improve “safety,” which apparently includes things like establishing codes of conduct, making reporting of violations easy, publishing rules and requirements, and making clear it complies “…with all applicable laws in the places we do business and respond to legitimate requests from law enforcement.”
Is Microsoft a Buy, Hold or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on MSFT stock based on 32 Buys and two Holds assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 8.2% rally in its share price over the past year, the average MSFT price target of $631.36 per share implies 37.47% upside potential.
