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Hackers, Meet Microsoft

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the come-together dept.

Mz6 writes "The random chatter of several hundred Microsoft engineers filled the cavernous executive briefing center recently at the company's sprawling campus outside Seattle. Within minutes after their meeting was convened, however, the hall became hushed. Hackers had successfully lured a Windows laptop onto a malicious wireless network. 'It was just silent,' said Stephen Toulouse, a program manager in Microsoft's security unit. 'You couldn't hear anybody breathe.' The demo was part of an extraordinary two days in which outsiders were invited into the heart of the Windows empire for the express purpose of exploiting flaws in Microsoft computing systems. The event, which Microsoft has not publicized, was dubbed 'Blue Hat' -- a reference to the widely known 'Black Hat' security conference, tweaked to reflect Microsoft's corporate color."

2 of 496 comments (clear)

  1. Getting through to engineers is hard by kt0157 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In my previous company I tried to communicate with engineers. I was an engineer, but it's still damned hard. Programmers just don't "get it" without hard work. In the end, this kind of smack-in-the-face-by-the-real-world approach is what is needed.

    I reckon it's because so many programmers have at least a touch of Asperger's. The number of times I'd try to explain that customers behave like monkeys, focusing on the wrong things, buying products for the wrong reasons. But these reasons aren't "wrong" if it means the difference between selling a product and not selling a product. That yes, it's "wrong" to buy a product because we've used Times Roman screenfonts but the competitor used Tahoma, but just change the goddamn font, OK?

    Reminds me of the story about 1-Click from Amazon. After patiently explaining what he wanted, the developers all nodded and said, yes, they can do 1-click. A few weeks later the prototype is ready and Bezos tries it out. He clicks on a book. And up pops a dialog box that says "Are you sure?"..

    Read about this in Cooper's book "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum."

    K.

  2. Give Microsoft Its Due by MrNonchalant · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm banking that I'm the first one to say this, and that there are at least a few reasonable moderators out there.

    This represents a step in the right direction for Microsoft. Perhaps as a community we need to face the possibility that they may be changing. I read the entire article, and it seemed as if Microsoft genuinely wanted to change. I run Linux, and so do a lot of you, so it is understandable when a lot of you will deride Windows no matter what because it represents a competitor. I just don't buy into that philosophy, it doesn't hold much room for fair.

    Giant Anti-Spyware, IE 7, and the anti-vrus acquisitions are all good indications. Let us just hope, for the internet and personal computing's sake, that Microsoft doesn't blow it and charge for them. Either that, or blows it so hard their customers (corporate and power user home) all look for more stable operating systems (hint: all other consumer desktops of any note run a Unix derivative of one sort or another).