Microsoft Invites Black Hats into Vista

gtzpower writes "Microsoft is inviting hackers to 'Take Your Best Shot' at Vista. 'You need to touch it, feel it,' Andrew Cushman, Microsoft's director of security outreach, said during a talk at the Black Hat computer-security conference. 'We're here to show our work.'" From the article: "A security team with oversight of every Microsoft product — from its Xbox video game console to its Word program for creating documents — has broad authority to block shipments until they pass security tests. The company also hosts two internal conferences a year so some of the world's top security experts can share the latest research on computer attacks." Essentially a tie-in with an article we discussed yesterday.

Comments

No real black hats interested

[The Famous Brett Wat]

The real black hats want it to be widely deployed before they start exploiting it.

Quote

[Anonymous Coward]

"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Ballmer said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."

Say, wait. If you've just given prerelease test copies of Vista to 3,000 "black hats"... and you're hoping they'll find bugs in them and report them back to you before Vista ships... I mean... how do you know that's what they're actually going to do?

What if some of these "black hats" look over Vista, find security bugs, keep them secret, go back to Microsoft and say "Whelp! Looks like Vista doesn't have any security holes at all!"; then wait for Vista to be released, and once it's out have a 0-day exploit that they can use in their offshore spam/spyware businesses and that no one else will even know exists until two years from now when a gray hat independently finds and publishes it and Microsoft finally fixes it?

I mean, of course that's a worst case scenario. But still, sometimes I think the old thinking on how the world of hackers works no longer really applies now that the primary motivating force is not pride, but money (in the form of sweet, sweet herbal viagra).

Re:Microsoft invites what now?

[dr_dank]

Something like this would bring the wannabees and dingbats out of the woodwork. A real paranoid black hatter wouldn't want to have his identity known or put himself under Microsoft's sights for a non-serious amount of money. You'd better believe that people that take this challenge will be closely watched from now on.