Microsoft to Publish Blue Hat Findings

An anonymous reader wrote to mention an InfoWorld article about Microsoft's plan to publish some of the findings from last week's Blue Hat conference. From the article: "'Everything was fair game,' wrote SQL Server engineer Brad Sarsfield in a blog posting. 'Hearing senior executives say things like: 'I want the people responsible for those features in my office early next week; I want to get to the bottom of this' was at least one measure of success from my point of view for the event.' The Blue Hat name is a play on the Black Hat conferences, which have occasionally been criticized by IT vendors. The 'Blue' part comes from the color of badges that Microsoft staffers wear on campus." They have descriptions of some of the sessions up on the site for your perusal.

Comments

Could it be...?

[filesiteguy]

Could MS actually be taking security seriously?

Naaahh...

I'm sure this was a very interesting conference - nice to see names like Johnny Long there ( Google Hacking for Penetration Testers ) http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/11/ 1750217&from=rss and other notables. I'm curious if MS will ever really look at what it is that causes so much to go wrong with their departmental OS.

All the same, I'm sure the findings will be taken back, discussed among those who know and forgotten or buried by marketing executives.

Re:Could it be...?

[tpgp]

Could MS actually be taking security seriously?

Yes - yes they are.

You see - MS's customers are demanding it - and MS is trying to deliver - after all, their competition (mostly) is delivering. (See, this is why F/OSS is good for you even if you dont use it:)

Anyway, I do think MS is making an attempt to take security seriously, but security needs are ultimately outshadowed by their marketing needs.

Anyway, to bring things (mildly) back on topic, I'll repeat myself:

Note to Microsoft

We have more then enough hat colours as things stand.

Blue Hat hacker sounds like an IBM employee anyway (or an Anti-Fedora agent?)

Black Hats or...?

[Roadkills-R-Us]

And maybe they want to make sure when everyone thinks "$color hat" they *don't* think of "Red Hat".

MS plays that sort of game a lot.

Posturing

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Yawn... Heard all of these "I'm going to fix that Monday morning" stuff before so many times from so many companies, and seen so little action.

This is a pretty standard way for companies to handle lynch mobs of unhappy people: Put an exec up on a stage and have everyone yell their guts out and promise to investigate it thoroughly. This is not done just for software security, but just about everything.

Undoubtedly one or two simple, yet highly visible, things (eg. the password check) will be fixed to show that some action was taken.

Re:Blank passwords

[AKAImBatman]

I enjoy a good Microsoft bash (oh lololo m$ nevar innovates!!1!)

Good to know.

but your comment tells me you have probably no idea how commercial software works.

I'm not quite sure how this statement follows from your first. Do you like a joke or not? Maybe, just maybe, I was only joking?

The key is that it's an option that you (as the DB admin) can choose to turn off. The MySQL root account will also run with a blank password when you first install it from, say, Synaptic. It's up to you to tighten it down.

The reason why the root/sa passwords start blank is so you can configure the server immediately after installation. Using a default username/password of some sort (ala Oracle) wouldn't change the security situation to any appreciable degree, and only serves to force the DB administrator to look up the default every time he does an installation. (Which is likely to be rare enough to prevent him from memorizing it.)

Yeash. Way to spoil a joke.

Not so weird

[abb3w]

So, you claim the NSA asked Microsoft to not put AES in IE? This doesn't make much sense either. Like I said, almost every other browser, client or server already supports AES on SSL (including those offered by IBM). It's just weird that Microsoft lags so far behind.

Not that weird. Yes, every other browser/client/server supports it. IE still has comfortably more than half of the browser market, even though it's in decline. So, if the NSA can't break AES, they ask M$ not to put it in, and a large chunk of the traffic remains readily readable.

"But," you may say, "anyone who knows what they're doing will use something more secure." True. However on one hand, crooks and terrorists are often (albeit not always) stupid, and might not always do so; and on the other hand, the easily broken traffic can be quickly sorted out, leaving a smaller quantity of harder-to-break traffic where content analysis is neglected but traffic analysis approaches become profitable. Limiting the capabilities of the drooling-luser set is helpful, because it makes it easier to pick out the bad guys who hide by leaving a smaller set of both the good and the bad guys who can hide. Rather than struggling to separate all the good from the bad, they can first quickly separate the smart from the stoooopid.

Of course, there's no proof the AC's assertion is true... but it doesn't matter much for the sake of arguement.

Irresponsible responsibility

[redelm]

Comments like "I want those people on my carpet" are just foolish. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

People do things for reasons. Hammering them for things that turn out badly just produces CYA, fear and paralysis. Red in tooth-and-claw management always devours itself.