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Das Capitolin
07-13-2006, 05:15 PM
Microsoft to Show Off Vista at Asia Hacker Conference
JUL 11, 2006 07:15:56 AM | View/Add Comments (1) | Permalink

Microsoft plans to give a hacker conference in Asia an inside look at new security features on Windows Vista later this year, the organizer of the event said Tuesday.

The company’s commitment to show off Vista to the hacker and security community is part of a long-term trend aimed at gaining greater feedback from users prior to product debuts. More and more software and hardware vendors are trying to weed out vulnerabilities before products go to market, and they often turn to the underground and above-ground security community for advice.

"Companies know that fixing vulnerabilities in already-released products is always going to be much more expensive than finding and squashing them during the development stage," said Dhillon Andrew Kannabhiran, organizer of the sixth annual Hack In The Box deep knowledge security conference set for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in September.

"At the end of the day, it also doesn’t help an organization’s image when critical bugs are found which could have been trivially fixed from the start," he added.

The Hack In The Box conference will host two speakers from Microsoft.

The first, Dave Tamasi, a lead security program manager at Microsoft, will give a presentation on security engineering in Vista. The talk will include a discussion about features suggested by hackers and other security-conscious members of the computing community, in addition to security improvements made on Vista.

The second speaker, Douglas MacIver, a penetration engineer at Microsoft, will review Vista’s BitLocker Drive Encryption and the company’s analysis of threats and attempts to penetrate the security feature.

BitLocker Drive Encryption is a data protection feature in Windows Vista aimed at securing data on lost or stolen computing devices. It’s available in Windows Vista Enterprise and Ultimate for client computers and Windows Server "Longhorn." The software works by preventing an intruder or thief from running a software hacking tool to break Windows Vista files and system protections, or viewing files stored on the protected files when the computer is offline.

-Dan Nystedt, IDG News Service (Taipei Bureau)

Source: http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=22852

Kougar
07-13-2006, 05:32 PM
Well now I'm impressed, I didn't think MS had it in them... This should make for some interesting reading after the conference too ;)

Das Capitolin
07-13-2006, 05:52 PM
Well now I'm impressed, I didn't think MS had it in them... This should make for some interesting reading after the conference too ;)

Could this be the new direction for Microsoft? Instead of hate the hackers, they inform and educate the hackers, give them some free stuff, and win them over. Or maybe they just tout their new security and hope that someone in the audience will discuss a vulnerability with them?

werty316
07-13-2006, 06:51 PM
I wonder how bad Visita is so far for securty holes after the hackers went at it.

Kougar
07-13-2006, 07:13 PM
Could this be the new direction for Microsoft? Instead of hate the hackers, they inform and educate the hackers, give them some free stuff, and win them over. Or maybe they just tout their new security and hope that someone in the audience will discuss a vulnerability with them?

I think the last thing you said was their gameplan... ;) Which has actually worked for other businesses in the past pretty well. I think the the catching point here though is how many will point out security flaws and exploits, vs how many keep silent for later exploitation... although I think MS will still come out the better for doing this.