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What Spooks Microsoft's Chief Security Advisor

Posted by samzenpus on Thu Mar 27, 2008 06:57 AM
from the when-the-darkness-looks-back dept.
Microsoft Security
alphadogg writes "Microsoft's U.S. general manager/chief security advisor for its National Security Team, Bret Arsenault, thinks like a true security professional. In every bit of good news, he wonders what bad news could be coming. Application security, virtualization security and the fact that over half of computer attacks seen by Microsoft come from the .edu domain are just some of the things keeping him up at night."
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Submission: What spooks Microsoft's chief security advisor by alphadogg (971356)
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  • students sharpening their pens (Score:5, Informative)

    by ionix5891 (1228718) on Thursday March 27 2008, @07:01AM (#22880148)
    half of computer attacks seen by Microsoft come from the .edu domain

    nothing to worry just students testing their scripts against big bad microsoft :) we all did it at one stage ;)

    • Re:students sharpening their pens (Score:4, Interesting)

      by hostyle (773991) on Thursday March 27 2008, @07:07AM (#22880178)
      Fatter pipes are bigger targets to would-be evildoers, as it gives them more bandwidth with which to carry out their nefarious deeds. That makes a rooted .edu box almost as important a component of Dr. Evil In Trainings' arsenal as a hollowed out volcano island.

      • Fatter pipes are bigger targets to would-be evildoers, as it gives them more bandwidth with which to carry out their nefarious deeds. That makes a rooted .edu box almost as important a component of Dr. Evil In Trainings' arsenal as a hollowed out volcano island.
        At one time that was true. Not anymore. Haven't you heard? Fat pipes [verizon.com] are cheap and increasingly common these days.

        • Home connections still have fairly poor upstream compared to their downstream...
          People who root boxes want upstream, so they can scan for more boxes to hack, ddos things or distribute malware. They typically have very little need for downstream bandwidth to the compromised boxes.
          • People who root boxes want upstream, so they can scan for more boxes to hack, ddos things or distribute malware. They typically have very little need for downstream bandwidth

            There's a lot of home users out there running non-admined MS boxes.

            never underestimate the bandwidth of a truckload of pipes...

            • It's ironic you should say that. When I was in college I could upload and download movies from Sweden at 12 Megabytes a second. Capital M. (ahem) Now that I'm on a "residential" connection I am lucky to get 300 KB/s down, 100 KB/s up from anywhere...
              Thank YOU Internet2!
        • I mean seriously.... Bret Arsenault?

          Did he legally change his name after he got hired? Other cool pseudo-names: Ima Baadash, Tod Newclierre, or John Wepunce.
          • He's also a pretty cool guy. His group sponsors big, security awareness events twice a year for MS customers - and these are real sessions, not PR fluff. Bret is friendly and accessible.

            If he's at RSA this year, drop by the MS booth and say hi to him.

    • Re:students sharpening their pens (Score:5, Insightful)

      by an.echte.trilingue (1063180) on Thursday March 27 2008, @07:10AM (#22880202) Homepage
      True. Students usually have time on their hands, knowledge at their disposal and being young they still have an underdeveloped sense for the potential consequences of their actions. Oh, and T1 connections directly into the dorms. Just talk to somebody who administers a university network: trying to keep students from "playing" with the school infrastructure is a nightmare.

      • Re:students sharpening their pens (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Brian Gordon (987471) on Thursday March 27 2008, @07:13AM (#22880222)
        No T1 directly into my dorm.. unless you're at MIT chances are you're starved for bandwidth and have to sleep during the day and game all night to get any decent pings.

        • Re:students sharpening their pens (Score:5, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 27 2008, @07:27AM (#22880328)

          unless you're at MIT chances are you're starved for bandwidth and have to sleep during the day and game all night to get any decent pings.
          You don't get very good grades, do you?
        • It might be a T1. A T1 is only 1.5 Mbit. That's not enough bandwidth for a dorm full of MIT students who are all trying to play online games and hack.
          • Actually, it's pretty damn Canadian. I can't believe you're at one of our universities and you're still conflating our values and the USA's.
      • Peesh... T1.

        You should try working for an ISP, where we have a gigabit pipe into the office... now, if I could only persuade IT support to get me a network card capable of keeping up with it ;)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jav1231 (539129)
      I smell a big Microsoft initiative for securing colleges and universities coming. Government contracts, proprietary model continues, and it's all for our children.

  • Big surprise? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by suso (153703) * on Thursday March 27 2008, @07:02AM (#22880150) Homepage Journal
    over half of computer attacks seen by Microsoft come from the .edu domain

    Actually, does this really surprise anyone? I think if you took away the botnets that might attack Microsoft, you might have
    something more like 80%. Not that it was an attack, but I used to always use billy@microsoft.com as a return address when I was testing
    e-mail or showing someone something.
    • I only have a small mail server's logs to look at (just my personal domain). But I haven't seen *any* botnets in the .edu domain attempting to deliver spam to me in the last 20 days. I think Microsoft is referring to cracking attempts?

      Top five domains (number of spam messages delivered to me):
      120 .net, 110 .com, 98 .ru, 95 .pl, 83 .it
      (Very simple statistics: just grepping the mail log for domain names. It doesn't include any host with no reverse DNS. And I don't get that much spam, as you can se

  • Cleaner Version (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 27 2008, @07:08AM (#22880186)
    Without [networkworld.com] all of the ads. Won't someone please think of my eyes?
  • i presume same things that spooks every other network admin

    *rooted linux boxes, yes these are dangerous in wrong hands :(
    *Russian business network
    *chineese spammers
    *prolonged multi gbit DDOS

    • Yes, but this is Microsoft's Cheif Security Advisor ...

      This is slashdot ... the headline should read "What spooks Microsoft's Chief spook?"

  • The guys is an idiot (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 27 2008, @07:17AM (#22880254)
    The reason why the security flaws are dropping is because the 2 largest groups of crackers are operating under foreign govs. The russians were out to make money, But now operate with the russian gov. In addition, the chinese crackers have also switched up. Why? Because they can do all this legally in their country and not worry about a bullet to the brain. The simple fact is, that 5 years ago, these folks were cracking systems for money. Now, they are cracking targeted systems (i.e. DOD) and using subtle openings. Almost certainly the big openings are being saved for future use.

  • Q&A (Score:5, Funny)

    by cerberusss (660701) <`ln.kiuknav' `ta' `todhsals'> on Thursday March 27 2008, @07:22AM (#22880288) Homepage Journal
    Question: What do you think about Microsoft's U.S. general manager/chief security advisor?
    Answer: I think it would be a good idea.
  • What Spooks Microsoft's Chief Security Advisor?

    Flying chairs?
  • "Application security, virtualization security and the fact that over half of computer attacks seen by Microsoft come from the .edu domain are just some of the things keeping him up at night."

    As a user of said computers/servers i much prefer a scripthappy student whimsing around my systems alerting me about security issues. What do worries me are govt founded hackers stealing sensitive information, research and other secrets leaving no n00b traces for me to discover. Its not the actual breakin that worries me but what the perpetrator do thats an issue. If someone breaks in but does no harm i can live with that. My feelings may get hurt but the company is ok atleast.

    An application/OS vendor ofcourse prefer the stealth hacker since the student hacker brings into attention all the various security issues with their products and makes people look for other options. Many vendors prefer a company being hacked to pieces before letting an exploit being known publicly. Microsofts own exploit policy is a very telling sign of this. As long as an exploit isnt used extensively its not going to get patched regardless of how many systems are exploitable. That worries me at night...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Bert64 (520050)
      I doubt it's students in control of those .edu systems...
      They are probably being used as jump boxes by hackers operating elsewhere, including those government sponsored ones.

  • The "price of innovation" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MikeRT (947531) on Thursday March 27 2008, @07:46AM (#22880456) Homepage
    is that you end up making short cuts to bring products to market as quickly as the public demands with software.

    It also doesn't help that software rarely has a chance to mature into a known quantity before it is tossed out for something new.

    I've been tasked to junk systems that weren't perfect, but that worked well enough to get the job done because the customer was pissy about them. Rather than tell their people to get over it, they wanted something new.

    And lo and behold, you might say "meet the new system, same as the old system" because they traded one not perfect system for another not perfect system that had its own new issues.

  • This Guy Doesn't Get Security (Score:3, Interesting)

    by segedunum (883035) on Thursday March 27 2008, @07:49AM (#22880470) Homepage

    Among the most frustrating findings for Arsenault: Just over half of all attacks originated from the .edu domain. "[That's] a fundamental problem," he said. "We've got to do a better job with the university systems to stop that."
    You can never run around trying to get people, and universities, to stop things that are basically open-ended. If those are the number of attacks you're experiencing then those are the number of attacks you're experiencing, regardless of where they originate from and why. The web is a free place, and it shows an exceptional naivety to think that can be stopped by pressuring universities.

    But Arsenault does sweat over whether there's really less exploitable code, or whether it's more a case of such code just being kept secret by nation states looking to wage cyberwar.
    Rrrrrrrrrright. So just like with Iraq's incredibly destructive weapons, if there isn't anything happening then it's because there is something even more devious and cunning going on?

    Mind you, I wouldn't have expected anything less from Microsoft's Chief Security Advisor.

  • Computer Security what is a crime and what isn't? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mlwmohawk (801821) on Thursday March 27 2008, @07:50AM (#22880476)
    I hear a lot of people make the analogy that computer breaches are like breaking and entering, and while some of the actions are, some are clearly not.

    Mischief is the motivation of youth. Vandalism is a form of expression. We've all participated in it in some form, so everyone get off their high horse, and rather than "get tough on crime," its time to figure out the difference between kids having fun and serious criminals. It is also time to make computer systems in "the digital world" as resilient to mischief and vandalism as real physical buildings are in the real world.

    We've all carved our names in a tree in a park. We've all stolen a pack of gum or something from a store. We've all done petty crimes when we were young. The difference in the digital world is that everything is so brittle and poorly built and the mischief that is expected from youth ends up costing companies [B|M]illions of dollars. In the classic movie, "War Games," a kid practically starts world war III, the analogy fits if you excuse the hyperbole.

    From a societal point of view, we need to separate the smarts kids being mischievous from the criminals committing real harm, just like we do in the real world.

    • Mischief is the motivation of youth. Vandalism is a form of expression. We've all participated in it in some form, so everyone get off their high horse

      Ahem.
      Perhaps it is your horse that you should be dismounting from. Don't presume to speak on behalf of everyone else with regard to participation in unruly behaviors. Dipshit.

      We've all stolen a pack of gum or something from a store.

      ORLY??
      Somebody owes me a free pack of gum, then. Apparently I missed "sticky finger day" when I was a kid.

      we need to separate the smarts kids being mischievous from the criminals committing real harm

      Your arrogance astounds me. You actually think that "mischievous" behavior and socially irresponsible law breaking is somehow correlated to "being smart". Wow.

    • I guess I'm just a "goody two shoes." When I was growing up, I never stole a pack of gum (or anything else) from a store. I never carved my name in a tree or participated in vandalizing something at all (much less as a "form of expression"). My motivations in my youth had nothing to do with mischief. I did experiment with computers, but they were my own computers or they were the school's and I was acting within the limits of my classroom activities. For example, when asked to program a slot machine program on an old Apple IIe, I finished *way* before everyone else. So I started adding in more features. I added in betting, and still people weren't done. So then I added in a mobster that you could borrow money from if you were broke. (I coded it so that you either paid him back in a certain number of turns or he broke an arm and a leg of yours, took all of your money, and the game ended.) I was exploring the limits of what my coding could do, but it was without causing harm/damage to someone else's property.

    • We've all carved our names in a tree in a park. We've all stolen a pack of gum or something from a store. We've all done petty crimes when we were young.
      Speak for yourself.
      • You've never broken the law? You've never exceeded the legally posted speed limit? You've never spit on the street? Tell me where you live and I bet I can find a few local ordinances you've broken.

        Don't lose the point by being pedantic.
      • This is exactly what I'm talking about. Equating serious crime with mischief. Vandalism is by no means the violent act that rape is.
          • Again, you are being "absolutist" about this, and that is the problem. Your descriptions do not describe mere mischief, but harassment and intimidation. They *may be* acts described as vandalism, but they are more serious than what I'm talking about.

            Putting a sticker on a street sign. Carving your name in a tree. Small mischievous things are far different than wholesale destruction.

            This "zero tolerance" absolutist world we live in doesn't allow children to make mistakes or recover from bad judgment. One mistake and they want to bring the full force of law down on you.

            Some transgressions should not be considered crime even though they share some similarity, and in some cases repercussions, as real crime. Kids have bad judgment, it is a fact and it is a flaw in human beings. We should seriously consider this during prosecution.
  • It may seem strange, but if you're a security professional and relish a severe challenge (or just want the money), then the Redmond campus may be just the place you want to be! However, after a while I can only imagine that the experience must feel more like beating your head against a wall.

  • "One reason for this, Arsenault says, is that vendors like Microsoft, Apple and Red Hat have done a good job in recent years securing the IP stack and operating system."

    So either Microsoft's chief security advisor really thinks Red Hat is responsible for Linux security, and also thinks that security can be layered on in recent years rather than being a fundamental part of the core design starting from day one, or more likely his title should be "Marketing Advisor/Security Spin Specialist"

  • your own fault (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nguy (1207026) on Thursday March 27 2008, @08:21AM (#22880744)
    Among the most frustrating findings for Arsenault: Just over half of all attacks originated from the .edu domain. "[That's] a fundamental problem," he said. "We've got to do a better job with the university systems to stop that."

    There's a simple solution: stop maintaining the fiction that one company and one operating system can do it all. If you want to be a vendor of high-uptime, high-reliability systems, concentrate on that market segment and stop marketing your systems to the mass market. On the other hand, if you want to be a vendor of flaky commodity operating systems, stop worrying about your systems not being secure and stop marketing them as such (oh, and run your own corporate operations on something that actually is secure).

  • opportunity knocks? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sgt scrub (869860) <saintium@y a h o o.com> on Thursday March 27 2008, @08:21AM (#22880748) Homepage
    With Vista and other new products, Microsoft ships the hardening guide along with the product

    Dell, Toshiba, HP, et el do not send that documentation along with a new machine when Vista is pre-installed. Could they be held accountable for people getting pwnd? Could this be an opening to get the M$ tax back when someone is forced to buy a machine with Vista on it?

  • It's been about three now since the last Windows system at home was converted to Linux. And we sleep just fine, thank you.

    • Re:Punishment needs to fit the crime (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 27 2008, @07:16AM (#22880242)
      That's quite the straw man... and it seems to be singing something...

      *listens in*

      "If I only had a brain..."

    • 10 years? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Shivetya (243324) <shivetya@archonon.cFREEBSDom minus bsd> on Thursday March 27 2008, @07:16AM (#22880244) Homepage
      Hell you can kill someone and not even get that much time. If your rich or a politician you can get off completely.

      I agree with punishment fitting the crime but I think you put too much value on the damage the cause. The simple fact is that too few of people take the required steps to protect themselves. People have locks on their homes and cars, they don't normally allow complete strangers inside, and most people won't give out personal information to complete strangers they meet. Yet when it comes to the net it seems as if all bets are off, you never know what they will do - other than it being stupid.

      I am all for punishment, but damn, people put more value on things and animals than human life.
    • 10 years in a federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison?
      • "Yeah, let's start ruining young hackers' (and I mean that in the positive sense) lives for youthful indiscretion, that's the way to go."

        Aww diddums. Perhaps we shouldn't punish kids when they chuck bricks through someones window either since that'll be just youthful exuberance right?

        "it's just that the 'crime' of rooting some insecure corporate box and not doing anything particularly destructive or criminal (credit card fraud etc.) with it is just not what I'd consider a big deal"

        Rooting around someones pr

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by GauteL (29207)
      He could have a Toyota sports car from 1992 and be very enthusiastic about it you know. Plenty of people would rather spend loads of money on their old MR2 than buy a new car.

      Personally that's not my cup of tea, but it is pretty ignorant to label him as some kind of cheap moron and it is pretty daft to think that a top level manager at Microsoft is somehow a poor man.
    • Hey! I drive a 12 year old Corolla (don't know what they're marketed as in the US) and it's a fine car.
      I've grown out of the "must be capable of 180 and 0-60 in under 4secs attitude and now it's just a means of getting about.
      Just because he doesn't share your (in my opinion juvenile) obsession in modes of transport doesn't mean he's underpaid
      In fact given the general security level of MS products he's almost certainly overpaid ;)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mlts (1038732) *
      Actually, those times are upon us, and its not a bad thing. Any professional software developer will sign their install code, .MSI files, .CAB files, and executables before it ships. Its not uncommon for a company to have a domain policy of refusing to execute any executables on a production network that are not Authenticode signed.

      Why is this not a bad thing? Simple due diligence/CYA. If I install a signed executable from a company and it causes a malware breach, then the damage done can be explained a

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