Microsoft Aims to Make Life Harder, More Expensive For Attackers

MIAMI BEACH–It’s been a decade now since Microsoft began focusing on product security as a top priority and there have been a lot of successes and some failures along the way. But in that time, one of the things that most definitely has changed as a result of the Trustworthy Computing program is...

Ten Years After Gates's Memo, Effects Still Being Felt

Ten years. That’s a really long time. Think about what you were doing 10 years ago. Can you even remember? Maybe you were in college or high school, or cripes, even grade school. Or maybe you were working in security already, trying to figure out why your network kept getting overrun by viruses a...

Microsoft Invents New Way To Measure Online Safety (And Finds That Consumers Stink At It)

Computer users are taking steps to mitigate online security threats, but still only score a paltry 34 out of 100 – a solid “F” – according to a new study by Microsoft. The study, sponsored by Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group TwC, introduces a new metric, the Microsoft Computing Safety Inde...

The Past, Present and Future of Software Security

Perhaps no segment of the security industry has evolved more in the last decade than the discipline of software security. At the start of the 2000s, software security was a small, arcane field that often was confused with security software. But several things happened in the early part of the...

Former DHS Cybersecurity Chief Reitinger Named Sony CISO

Former Department of Homeland Security cyber-security chief Philip Reitinger has been named as the new executive vice president and Chief Information Security Officer of Sony Corporation. In his new position, Reitinger will be in charge of global information security and privacy at the electronic...

U.S. Backs Research Into What Makes Cyber Criminals Tick

The following is an exclusive Threatpost interview with Samuel Weber, Program Director for the National Science Foundation’s Trustworthy Computing Program. The interview took place on Monday, June 27, 2011 at the RFIDSec 11 Conference on the campus of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The...

Microsoft Cites Progress in SDL Report, Advocates More Adoption of ASLR, DEP

In the more than nine years since Bill Gates’s Trustworthy Computing email kicked off Microsoft’s comprehensive, company-wide security initiative, the company has not only committed a tremendous amount of money and resources to the project but also has been quite open and public about the process...

Katie Moussouris on Microsoft, Trustworthy Computing and the Evolution of the Security Community

Dennis Fisher talks with Microsoft’s Katie Moussouris about the way that the Trustworthy Computing effort at Microsoft has changed, how the security community has evolved since she got involved in the 1990s and the challenges–and fun–of being a woman in security. Podcast audio courtesy of sykboy6...

Microsoft Proposes 'Health Certificates' For Internet Access

Microsoft is proposing a new Internet-wide security model, based on the concepts of public health, that is designed to address the problem of how to prevent infected machines from affecting the security and performance of PCs elsewhere on the Web. The model would require each PC to present a...

End of Support for XP SP2 is End of an Era

Microsoft’s announcement this week that it is preparing to end support for machines running Windows XP SP2 not only represents a challenge for the thousands of businesses still running SP2, but also is the end of an era for both Microsoft and its customers. By the time Microsoft drops support for...

Has Apple Gotten Religion on Software Security?

Information security is an unpredictable, fluid discipline. There are very few absolute truths, but for the last few years, one of those has been that Apple isn’t paying much attention to software security. At least that’s the received wisdom. This theory is based mainly on the fact that security...

MS Discovers Over 1,800 Office 2010 Bugs

Microsoft uncovered more than 1,800 bugs in Office 2010 by tapping into the unused computing horsepower of idling PCs. Office developers found the bugs by running millions of “fuzzing” tests, said Tom Gallagher, senior security test lead with Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group. Read the full...

What If Bill Gates Never Wrote the Trustworthy Computing Memo?

The security industry has undergone massive changes in the last 15 years, and in some cases it’s hard to imagine what things would be like had these events not taken place. Think of a world in which Google focuses on security and privacy and Microsoft never started Trustworthy Computing, and you...

Adobe quarterly patch release should serve as an example

Adobe has become the third major software vendor to begin shipping its security updates on a regular schedule. Following the lead of Microsoft and Oracle, who have been releasing patches on a set schedule for many years, Adobe now will ship its patches once per quarter. It’s a move that’s overdue...

Charney plugs Microsoft end-to-end trust at RSA Conference

Scott Charney used his keynote speech at the RSA Conference on Tuesday to talk up a variety of hardware and software-based technologies meant to infuse the Internet with more trust. Charney, the head of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing team, talked about the need for greater adoption of TPMs, co...