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A Look at Microsoft's Security War Room
Josh Fink writes "C|Net has an interesting piece about Microsoft's Security War Room, or rather, shall I say rooms. This room came about when Microsoft's security chief, Mike Nash, had issues finding open conference rooms. The response; a dedicated room only for him and his staff to handle emergencies. "And while he was at it, why not have two? That way, the folks working on fixing a security crisis could have a little breathing room from those drafting the public and customer communications around the issue. ""
"No Penguins Allowed"
Anyone notice that all the swivel chairs are bolted to the ground? I wonder why they made them fixed and permanent.
The two shall never meet.
It's shocking they never had a dedicated fix team until now. Should have guessed it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
And in one of them, you will find a WinMe machine wanting to challenge you to a tick-tack-toe.
Viruses, backdoors, security holes, buffer overflows, trojans galore... and they get a room. Ooooh, they're so dedicated to security!
But do they have a ping-pong table???
"OSHA has requested that they remove all chairs from the premises for employee safety."
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
I get that they call it the "Security War Room" but what is it used for?
They have a big sign out front indicating security, but they don't even have locks on the kitchen cabinets.
The front page still has a former M$ employee talking about bugs being denied and going unfixed for months and years. The spin room is a lie room. It's not surprising they hate GNU/Linux, free software and anything else that allows users to talk to each other openly.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Is it just me or is slashdot's headlines as of late running parallel to the average idiots way of describing everything as a war?
Somewhat disconcerting, and humorous at the same time seeing as MS has a 'war room'. All while knowing of the monumental failures of current wars. E.g 'war on drugs' 'war on poverty' 'war on obesity', etc.
I guess just add 'war against standards compliancy' to the list.
Bought the ticket, taking the ride.
Judging from all the security holes in Microsoft products, I suspect this is more representative of the war room at Microsoft.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/03/0717229
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
...any windows there... ;)
Maybe I didn't examine the cabinets closely enough, but all the "food" in the slideshow picture was either coffee or items you'd use to flavor coffee. I know the old joke about programmers being machines that turn caffeine into code, but...
Microsoft's top engineers relentlessly persue their war on security.
Home fucking is killing prostitution.
Picture #4 is clearly their engineering conference room as defined in the article and without getting into specifics I expected more.
P.S. The fact it's often standing-room-only in a real crisis speaks to how cheap they went IMHO and little about chair throwing since "he" would never show up to one of these
That's just my POV... no more, no less.
When I read there were two rooms, my first reaction was: one to work on the current security threat, a second to work on the security threats created by the first one...
...where the lawyers can nap?
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
It's a backup for when the first room crashes!
- a bag of pretzels
- a couple bottles of hersheys chocolate syrup
- one can of soda or juice
- a couple containers of nondairy creamer
- 3 bottles that look like liquor bottles
All that to feed a group of engineers that "gets hit with an emergency and has to pull an all-nighter."Sounds like a typical geek diet to me.
Post-op greasy haired poster-tranny 'Ina Fried' ....talk about needing a junk filter. Toss this 'reporter' out along w/goatse.
Zero. A wall, a guy with a coffee machine, an image of some other guy, and a standard briefing room.
it's nice that it's so clearly stated exactly why there is this "war room". We have similar requests by various teams in our organization as if a war room is some amazing thing that you just can't live without. In reality it's almost always because some asshat can't be bothered to book meeting rooms in advance. If all the rooms are always booked, add more rooms. What you end up with is a room that no one else can use and except in dire situations, no one is using at ALL.
The sign out front looks like it had a bigger budget than the room itself.
Truthfully, it looks just like any other conference room, except they have fewer food items in the cabinets, and the place looks much less professional. I dare say it even looks cheaply done.
There is no one in those rooms!
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
I expected this, not some crummy office with a conference table.
Why do I get a vision of Jack Bauer taking orders from Bill Gates to wipe some Chinese online terrorists off the map from some CTU-like complex?
The game.
The photo with Harvey Keitel. All they need now is start listening to the man.
So it's not like the Maytag commercials where the old repair guy is reading a newspaper and bored for lack of work?
"You can't patch in here, this is the Microsoft Security War Room!"
Looks like Microsoft has a new shill at news.com, with Microsoft setting the agenda for the week of articles. Find a reporter, give him/her special access so long as everything written is in a positive tone about Microsoft, and the Microsoft script is followed. Gushing is encouraged.
I've been in a few war rooms, control centers, command centers, etc etc etc over the years. Even helped design one a little. 4 Flat screens is all they've got? Four? That's no war room. Scuffle closet maybe?
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
Actually, it's not. Someone obviously screwed up the story. To fix it, just read "war room" as "blood bath".
So basically this is where they decide how they're gonna cover-up a vulnerability, what it would cost if it were public and based on that, how much they're gonna spend to silence whoever discovered it for good.
A vulnerability must have a huge cost to justify developing, testing and publishing an update for it. In a FLOSS project, it's just as simple as writing the patch and merging it with the tree. For them, it's much, much worse. If there's no benefit for MS to fix something, they won't.
I heard both Lunix and OSX were going to try chasing MS's tail lights on this and having their own dedicated security conference rooms, but they decided to just stick with security through obscurity.
And besides, there is no "Lunix HQ" anyway, and Apple is too busy whipping up shiny new psychodelic backgrounds for their Leoptard patch (due out sometime in the next three years, since they still won't admit anything is wrong with it).
(Quote from Contact)
sigs are hazardous to your health
This war room looks like the "computer room" of a cheap shit computer school, where they teach Word courses for $75.00.
Totally shitty looking, uninspired. If you have to fight in this environment, you feel like a looser already.
"Gentlemen, you can't patch sotware here! This is the security war room!"
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
...when Slashdot top headlines are belittled to a boring meeting room at Microsoft.
How ironic.
And in the previous photograph, entitled 'And this is our food cupboard': Some syrups, a bag of pretzels and instant coffee. Obviously, they don't take security problems that seriously.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Seriously, a few photos of a conference room? And Harvey Keitel and an espresso machine? This is just a room where people sit down to discuss issues. Just like in every office everywhere in the world, except this one has some TVs on the wall. Can I please have that 10 minutes of my life back?
Someone should photoshop that first pic so that the Dell flatpanel shows either a BSOD or "All your base are belong to us" message.
It seems fitting they have a picture of Harvey Keitel playing The Wolf character from Pulp Fiction hung on the wall.
I've had to clean up after a large scale Microsoft failure a few times, and it the whole process did seem like going on "Brain Detail" in the back of a car.
-ted
Gentlemen there's no fighting in here. This is the war room.
I imagine a bunker outfitted with state of the are iLoo's and binders labeled "targets in megadeath". Purity of essence!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
When you came pulling in here, did you notice a sign out in front of my house that said Dead Server Storage?
;) )
(If you don't know what I'm talking about, RTFA
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
Sounds like Ina's junk was filtered some time ago. But be nice, trannies are people too.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
No need to even RTFA.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
M$ conceals their problems and lies about it. So says former M$ employees and the result has been covered here many times. Who cares how many rooms they have set aside to formulate their lie? The result is consistent.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
as modern technology should have replaced having to require dedicated meeting rooms... aren't videoconferencing and whiteboard software up to the task yet??? It should enable people to have meetings across several timezones without having to go to the trouble of all traveling to one place...
or is this just some form of juvenile office politics... look, my meeting must be important, all these people had to drop everything to come to it...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
That is just so cheap with the VGA cable hanging from the projector like that! Haven't they ever heard of trunking?!
Warbling, Articulating Responses Room...
Wide-Area Radioactivity Room
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
one of the biggest software companies in the world got not only one, but two unused conference rooms!
I smell a Pulitzer on its way.
http://www.torani.com/
A picture of Harvey Keitel from Pulp Fuction? What, no Dr. Strangelove pics available?
Also, I have to wonder how wise it is for C|Net to post that picture in light of this article, especially since it bears the legend "(C) CNET Networks."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
It looks like Microsoft is so cheap on security that they couldn't even spring for a long enough cable to the projector to keep it from hanging down in the middle of the conference room table. Someone should tell them that the shortest is not always the best route.
Please wear a helmet; look out for flying chairs.
Make it show an OS X desktop.
More than meets the eye:
http://www.wolfware.dk/intro/welcome.asp
~hylas
How boring.
Wow Microsoft has office meeting rooms too? What a concept let's tell the world what i discovered. I want my braincells back i lost after reading this
I wonder if Apple has a "war room"?
If they do, I think iScrewed would be an apt name for it. Of course it wouldn't be used nearly as much as Microsoft's... hmm... maybe thats where they come up with all the Mac vs. PC ads.
...on security, of course. Not much unlike the ongoing war on terror.
For some reason I think that if the description had included FTFA: "The Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) was completed in June 2005. The engineering conference room includes four flat-panel screens that can display live TV or a computer screen as well as a couple dozen chairs, though the place is often standing-room-only in a real crisis." It would not be slashdotted at the moment.
MISSING - Sig file. 2 years old black and white and very funny. If found please email me.
Not to go too far OT, there was a great documentary by the same name. If you haven't seen it, rent it. It's a fascinating look at the "behind the scenes".
Yet another "war room". And like the parent, I've never heard it called anything else.
For a moment I thought it was from The Onion ..
Everything Microsoft has done is just funny (Balmer's dances, Zune Squirt, and this)..
Who needs The Onion when we got Microsoft
Basically, they separated the urinals from the stalls.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I work for an AV integrator, and that room is god awful. The projector mount is garbage. The lighting blows, and that Creston panel is a POS. Its hard to tell from the picture but that looks like a sprinkler head not a mic, which means there is no audio system set up for teleconference (that vtx isn't going to cut it in a room that large), and sure as shit no video conferencing with those lights, don't even get me started on those color combinations. Looks like there are some pop-up boxes and it also looks like there not finish building the room out. Odds are there are 4 more LCD's on the other wall to the back of the photo, but who knows. Looks like there 32's also. You should see some of the conference rooms at Google.
People take the chairs and put them in their office. They always leave one swivel chair so they can say they just took the extras. The offices generally have a swivel chair and a normal one that they replace the stolen swivel chair with. Then you get emails saying where is my swivel chair. I got it really bad once. Both of my swivel chairs were taken and replaced with fixed wooden chairs that were old and had would looked like booger stains on them.
I bet that room is used for playing games instead.
http://208.65.153.251/watch?v=Hxx2KcPWWZg
A room for handling security problems at Microsoft.... they should have turned the second room into a Starbucks, because you know they are using the room 24/7 :)
"It's better to be a pirate then join the Navy"
They couldn't even have the LCD projector cables neatly routed. Its just like hanging down onto the table like.. OMG.. is that tied into a noose? OMG, is that a body!!!
Pretty please, with sugar on top, fix the fucking security hole.
Never monkey with another monkey's monkey.
Or are the screens the only vista? ...Lorenzo
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.
Its not what I would expect a MS security room.
I thought it would be full of MS staff making security fixes to their software but who am I kidding?
Funny! How about iDumped?