Microsoft Consults Ethical Hackers at Blue Hat

linumax writes "For the second year in a row, Microsoft Corp. invited a small number of hackers onto its Redmond, Wash., campus to crack the company's products for all to see.Blue Hat V2 was held on Thursday and Friday and teamed noted "white hat" hackers with Microsoft employees to break into and expose security weaknesses in the company's products. Over 1,000 Microsoft developers, managers and security experts attended, including Microsoft brass Jim Allchin and Kevin Johnson, co-presidents of the company's Platforms, Products & Services Division."

I wonder...

[CygnusXII]

I wonder how many items covered this year, were rehashes of last year, and "we told ya so!"

Re:Good thing

[SycoCowz]

A small invited group is hardly representative of the resources global hacker community. They should unleash the world on their software, ala OpenHack; that would be a better security test and/or learning experience.

Ethical Hackers.. White Hat Hackers..

[jkind]

Okay I don't like either of these terms for hackers with morals.. Lets think of something new:

-Deeks (decent geeks?)
-Prerds (Principled Nerds?)
-Fairackers (fair hackers?)
Also remember that the term hacker is not always seen as negative in of itself: From: http://www.smoothwall.net/support/glossary.html [smoothwall.net] "A highly proficient computer programmer who seeks to gain unauthorised access to systems without malicious intent."

PR Stunt.

[miffo.swe]

Just like with Windows 2000 (the unbreakable) this is just a publicity stunt. Real security comes from good design, not slap together crap and let 1000 monkeys throw random bits at it.

Stupid

[NullProg]

This does nothing towards Mom and Dad surfing the internet using IE. Getting owned is simple.

XP/SP2 and 2003 Server are pretty much secure out of the box. When can we look forward to
IE being moved to user space? Never? When can we look forward to an O/S that doesn't have a re-ocurring fee every three years? Why do I have to agree to license a patch (MS05-51) for software I bought that was defective in the first place?

If it weren't for Quicken, Mom and Dad would be using SuSE by now.

Enjoy,

Re:I could have saved them a lot of trouble

[waamaral]

Let's just say the last time I installed a plain Win2k (i.e. no SP) I got the Blaster Worm 2 minutes after the first boot, and I didn't even started ANY program, including iE (I was trying to prove to myself the point that user interaction wasn't needed to compromise your system).
The Windows I have now is XP-SP2, but I have not run into this, as I unplugged the network before installing, and only plugged again after I got a firewall installed.
And, of course, any decent firewall will block this type of thing - that's precisely what the firewall is made for.