Video: Inside Microsoft's Top Secret Computer
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(160 sec.) The company's flat surface machine is the first in its category.
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SEATTLE/SAN FRANCISCO  - Computer hackers are off  and running trying to find vulnerabilities in Microsoft Corp.'s  new Windows Vista operating system, putting to test the  software maker's claim that it is the most secure Windows  program ever.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft's Ben Fathi has a new job now that Vista has shipped, but the man who led the company's Security Technology Unit is still focused on keeping the bad guys away from your PC. Fathi is now corporate vice president of development with the Windows Core Operating System Division, and is in charge of building the guts of the OS -- things like the kernel, networking, and security. IDG News Service sat down with him recently to discuss the future of Windows security. With the first Vista bugs now being reported, Fathi says it looks like Vista is on track to meet his own stated goal of having half the flaws that plagued XP during its first year. Following is an edited transcript of the interview, conductedÂ last week at theÂ RSA ConferenceÂ in San Francisco. IDGNS: What's going to be the big security story in 2007? Fathi: What we've done in previous OS releases and Vista and what our security partners are doing has treated security as a defensive measure. It's a way of stopping people from attacking you. What we want to do now is move to a world where we actually enable and simplify collaboration between different individuals, by making sure that those connections are end-to-end, that you can provide very fine grained control over the people, the applications and the resources that you give access to. IDG: So what are you doing to make that happen? Fathi: There are a number of things we are working on. For example, isolation. We look at isolation in terms of network isolation, whether it's IPsec [Internet Protocol security] or putting in firewalls, or SSL VPN [Secure Sockets Layer Virtual Private Network]. What we want to do is provide a better layer of isolation at the operating system level. We're looking at putting hypervisors underneath the operating system and building attestation and building a hardware root of trust on the machine. What that means is that today, if a rootkit makes it onto your machine, it can do a hyperjacking. It can take over the OS or it can even get underneath the OS so that any software you're running, like Kernel Patch Protection, won't even know that it's being lied to by a piece of malware underneath. What we want to do is put the hypervisor there and use things like the TPM [Trusted Platform Module] chip to make sure that the entire boot path is protected and secure and we can trust it and it hasn't been tampered with. This also gives you the ability to create isolation by creating partitions on the machine. Let's say you're running a server. If you consolidate your server workloads onto a single big machine -- you have a Web workload and a file server workload and a database workload. You want to protect that database workload because you're running your line-of-business apps on it. Just because somebody broke into your Web server doesn't mean they should be getting access to your database or your file server. IDGNS: Are you surprised by the number of Vista bugs that you've had reported since the launch? Fathi: I made a statement six or nine months ago that I would like to see half as many vulnerabilities as XP in the first year. Obviously I'd like less than that. I'd be happy with zero. But I think it's reasonable to say, given the additional complexity and given the additional size of Vista, that half as many would be a great goal. Am I surprised with the number? No, I think it's been a relatively small number of vulnerabilities in the three months we've been out. And given the fact that we proactively went out to the Black Hat conference and handed out copies of this, and that a couple of million people have been using Vista in test versions for the past year or so, that tells me that there are already hackers out there that are trying to attack it. So given that there are less than a handful of vulnerabilities discovered, I think that's good progress. IDGNS: And you're on track for that half as many? Fathi: I think so. Ask me again in six months. Â
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A bug in Microsoft&#39;s Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000 and Proxy Server 2 can let hackers spoof Web content, such as a trusted site, with their own fake content, the Redmond
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(InfoWorld) - Security researcher Joanna Rutkowska has demonstrated several methods that sophisticated rootkits can use to hide from even the most reliable detection method currently available -- hardware-based products that read a system's RAM. Rutkowska is a researcher with security firm Coseinc Advanced Malware Labs. She recently outlined several ways of getting around the UAC (User Account Control) feature introduced in Windows Vista. Several researchers have identified problems with UAC. The demonstration, given at the Black Hat security conference in Arlington, Va., indicates that if a rootkit is advanced enough, there currently is no way it can be reliably detected, Rutkowska said. Rootkits are designed to hide some activity from observers and have recently been used to conceal the presence of Trojans and hacker backdoors -- not to mention Sony BMG's copy-protection software. Several hardware-based systems exist for acquiring an image of a computer's RAM, the most reliable way to detect the presence of certain kinds of rootkits, Rutkowska said. Those include Tribble, Komoku's CoPilot, and RAM Capture Tool from BBN Technologies, but she said none are particularly easy to find. Rutkowska's findings mean system designers may need to come up with a system architecture better suited to forensic analysis, such as an interface dedicated to memory acquisition. "We live in the 21st century, but apparently can't reliably read the memory of our computers," she said at the presentation. "Maybe we should rethink the design of our computer systems, so that they were somehow verifiable." Rutkowska's presentation outlined three types of attacks, one that crashes the machine when RAM acquisition is attempted, a "covering attack" that allows the acquisition tool to see only garbage when it inspects certain parts of physical memory, and a "full replacing attack" that allows the tool to see false information when it scans parts of physical memory. The denial-of-service attack could leave investigators legally liable for crashing the system, Rutkowska said. The "covering attack" might allow investigators to see the malware's "hooks" in some cases, but would make it impossible for investigators to analyze the malware. And the "full replacing attack" could simply mean that the malware is never detected at all, she said.
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Microsoft may be the biggest target out there for hackers. Here's what the company does to protect itself from the continuous onslaught of probes and intrusion attempts.
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How your computer could be costing you thousands of dollars.
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Who do want to own today? Windows Vista may be Microsoft's most secure operating system to date, but researchers are still finding some glaring loopholes for hackers to exploit. Here is the latest: all you need is a Vista Install DVD to get admin level access to a hard drive.â¦
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Microsoft investigates how a pair of internal training videos by Ricky Gervais ended up on two websites.
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Microsoft is taking the wraps off this week, but the notion of a table-like computer has generated interest at the company since at least 2001.Photos: On the road to Microsoft's Milan
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ON THE SCENE - During an updated version of one of the more popular sessions at TechEd each year, senior security engineer and Microsoft MVP Marcus Murray demonstrated the use of some very simple hacking tools that can enable not-so-knowledgeable people to work their way to revealing the passwords of domain administrators in as little as 15 minutes.
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&#39;It&#39;s clearly a very powerful tool for locating information on the computer. On the flip side of things, it&#39;s a perfect spy program.
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Strolling past a row of user cubes during his lunch break, this IT guy notices something odd: One PC's monitor has a full-screen DOS prompt with lots of commands already entered -- and it looks like trouble.
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InfoWorld - Flying bikes, cell phone robots, smart walking sticks, and audio speakers that defy logic are inventions all on display Tuesday at Microsoft&#39;s Redmond, Washington, headquarters.
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Our colleagues over at PC World gathered up a list of products that each of them simply couldn't imagine going through daily life without. Some are relatively obvious, such as Windows 2003,  TiVO and Skype, and others a bit more odd, such as Cyber Systems' RoboForm. Heh?
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I can't urge you strongly enough to read the article entitled How Vista Lets Microsoft Lock Users In. It details how Microsoft has built into Vista the "trusted computing" ability to lock down Office files via DRM such that no unauthorized document reader will be able to decrypt and read them. This is perhaps one of the biggest hidden weapons Microsoft has in its arsenal that could sabotage Linux and OpenOffice.org if Microsoft succeeds in its attempt to plug SUSE and all Novell's "interoperability" bonuses.   Think of this, if you will, as the Tivoization of Office files, only with malicious intent.  Microsoft could, indeed, open up the document format completely and swear before God that it will never sue anyone for patent infringement.  However, this does not prevent Microsoft from locking Office files in such a way that only Vista users can read them.  No one else will be able to do so without the proper authorization, thus rendering the open format and Microsoft compatibility entirely meaningless.
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A government video shows the potential destruction caused by hackers seizing control of a crucial part of the U.S. electrical grid