Microsoft's Blue Hat Conference

SecureThroughObscure writes "ZDNet Zero-Day security blogger Nate McFeters got an exclusive look at the Microsoft Blue Hat conference. This is an invite-only conference that few media get to attend, but apparently McFeters was brought in with co-worker Rob Carter to talk about some vulnerabilities they had discovered with a few product security teams in attendence, and was also asked to do a guest blog posting about the conference at the Microsoft Blue Hat blog. McFeters also included several pictures of the conference and after conference events."

Microsoft + blue...

hmm... nope, can't think of a joke.

Re:Microsoft + blue...

Replace Blue with Ass :)

Re:

After Zune, I thought brown was Microsoft's color.

But...

Is this specifically a dig at Red Hat?

Re:

I'd say so, given the recent "Source Fource" and "Open Office XML" names... I wonder up to what extent the dreaded copyright law can be applied here. It'd be interesting to find out, but if OpenOffice is really a registered trademark, then OpenOffice.org m

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It's a take off of the Black Hat security conference, which is a vendor neutral. The terms Black hat and White hat are commonly used to describe the intent of security researchers who are either malicious (Black hat) or ethical (White hat).

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Why's it got to be about race, dog?

Re:But...

No, this is purely to create confusion. They always mess with unrelated terms to gain perception of familiarity in users -- meaningless slogan "Digital Nervous System" mimicked DNS acronym, ".NET" imitates a top-level domain, etc.

Re:But...

What users are you talking about? This is conference internal to Microsoft, with speakers invited (mostly) from Black Hat conference. It is limited to full-time employees ("blue badges") hence - BlueHat.

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Think Source Force, Office Open XML

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Hm, suddenly I think of Best Buy's geek squad and shudder. I bet that's where these blue hat guys are being hired from, knowing Microsoft.

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No, it's a riff on (a) Black Hat, the industry's leading vulnerability research conference, (b) Black Hat, the term of art for people who break software, and (c) Blue Badges, the slang internal term for MSFT full-timers.

Wow

This is worst than the third time Janeway took the borg head on by becomming a drone... probable but highly unlikely. One would think that a company that boasts itself in the media as much as Microsoft does for being an open book enterprise, that one of their Vulcans would give them a more logical approach. Think about it...

Re:Wow

Much like corporate purchasers, actually.

At least they don't clash

The Blue Hats match the blue screens you see.

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You lie! Windows NEVER blue screens by default any more...

...

...wait for it...

...

...because XP and newer now automatically restart [rbemrose.com] by default where they used to blue screen.

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However, you can bring back those thrilling days of yesteryear with this screen saver [microsoft.com].

More Hats?

Look, I was happy with black hat / white hat. Grey hat was pushing it... what is next, the zebra pimp hat conference?

Zebra pimp hat

That's for marketing people.

i know what it is

accessories for the bsod...

Wrong title

Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death Hat Conference

There, fixed it for you...

Why he was invited

The summary says "McFeters was brought in with co-worker Rob Carter to talk about some vulnerabilities they had discovered with a few product security teams in attendence" - that makes it sounds like Nate and Rob found vulnerabilities in Microsoft products. If you actually read the guest blog entry, it says:
"Microsoft had Rob Carter [...] and I come in to discuss some recent vulnerabilities that we've discovered with a few third-party vendors with whom Microsoft has tight relationships"

Probably this is referring to Adobe - Nate and Rob have previously reported [blogspot.com] vulns to them and had them patched.

I felt...

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if a conference of blue-hats suddenly cried out:

"I put on my robe and wizard hat..."

Blue hats

For some reason I was hoping this was about some Smurf fetish gathering.

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An invite-only confrence where they test how well their product does?

No testing happens at Blue Hat. The idea is from MS to have the best from Black Hat speak to it's own people - an idea interchange. It's MS-internal because MS wants its employees to get exposure to this information, and so that MS employees can discuss s