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5 Windows 7 security features businesses need to know about Part II
Each profile type has its own selection of applications and connections allowed through the firewall. For instance, in a home or small-business network marked Private, you might allow file and printer sharing, while on a network marked Public, you would likely disallow access to your files.
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Vista’s firewall profiles worked well except when a computer was connected to multiple networks simultaneously, such as an Ethernet and a wireless network. In those cases, the system would default to the most restrictive profile. This could cause problems when, for example, connecting to a corporate VPN through a public Wi-Fi hot spot; Vista would recognize simultaneous connections to both a public and domain network and apply the public profile to both.

All versions of Windows 7 allow computers to keep several firewall profiles active at the same time, maintaining the access and functionality of the more trusted network while blocking access via the less trusted network. Since many remote access functions require less restrictive firewall settings, users can now work securely while remaining protected from threats outside of the corporate network.

With fingerprint readers becoming more and more common on laptops, establishing a standard for the handling of biometric data has become important. Enter Windows Biometric Framework, a standardized method for storing fingerprint data and accessing it through a common API. Although most of the features of this subsystem are of interest only to developers, there are two important things that businesses should know Microsoft MCTS Training.

First, while fingerprint scanners could formerly be used to log onto a computer but not to log onto a corporate domain (a corporate network or network subsection), the Windows Biometric Framework allows domain log-in.

Second, users can store up to 10 unique fingerprints, one for each finger. While most of us probably don’t expect to lose a finger anytime soon, having all 10 fingers enrolled in the system is a good precaution in case of lesser injuries. A cooking accident or a hand caught in a door can easily modify a finger enough that it won’t register correctly with a fingerprint reader, and you don’t want a user to be barred access to his computer while he heals.

Fingerprints are added using the Biometric Device applet, which appears in the Control Panel of any Windows 7 computer with a fingerprint scanner attached and from which you can enable computer and domain log-in. You must be logged in as an administrator to add or manage fingerprints on Windows 7.

BitLocker To Go

One of the most serious security threats facing today’s businesses is the loss of a mobile asset containing confidential corporate information. Windows Vista’s BitLocker began to address this problem by allowing business users to encrypt a laptop’s entire hard drive so that if it were lost or stolen, nobody could access the information stored on it. BitLocker To Go extends the same protection to even more easily lost external drives, including pocket-size hard drives and tiny flash drives Microsoft MCITP Certification.

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Microsoft VMware customers are Windows customers first

Microsoft rarely finds itself in second place, but Microsoft’s head of server virtualization says he doesn’t mind playing catch-up to VMware in the hypervisor market.

For one thing, Microsoft’s Mike Neil notes that Hyper-V’s market share is growing faster than VMware’s, and says “that’s a good position for us to be in.” A skeptic might say outpacing VMware’s growth isn’t much of an achievement, because Microsoft MCTS Training is starting from a far smaller user base, and gets easy access to customers by offering Hyper-V as a component of Windows Server.
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VMware vs. Microsoft vs. Citrix

But Neil expresses confidence for another reason, simply that VMware customers are by and large also Windows customers. Microsoft and its virtualization partner Citrix have repeatedly butted heads with VMware, notably by pulling out as sponsors of last year’s VMworld conference after claiming that VMware unfairly limited competition at the show. h

But Microsoft will maintain a limited presence at VMworld in San Francisco Aug. 30 to Sept. 2, as it did last year, and make its pitch to VMware customers. VMware, by the way, is led by CEO Paul Maritz, a former Microsoft official.

“The vast majority of people running VMware are running Windows,” says Neil, general manager of Microsoft’s server virtualization and Windows Server division. “That’s the reason I go to something like VMworld. People who are running Windows are running it on top of VMware and I want to make sure they’re having the best experience they can. From our perspective, regardless of whether customers are running on Hyper-V or VMware, first and foremost they’re a Windows customer.”

Neil made the comments during an interview at last week’s Burton Group Catalyst conference, which featured a little bit of sparring between VMware and its rivals Microsoft and Citrix.

Citrix CTO Simon Crosby was quite outspoken against VMware, taking shots on-stage at the company’s security model and writing in a tweet that VMware’s SpringSource general manager Rod Johnson’s speech was “patently nonsensical.”

“He’s a competitor,” Johnson said of Crosby, during an interview. “I wouldn’t argue with Simon about virtualization, but he probably shouldn’t argue with me about Java and middleware.”

On stage, Crosby said the Xen virtualization security model has proven its capabilities in the Amazon cloud, while Neil said VMware has acted irresponsibly by attempting to take antivirus agents out of guest operating systems, in effect moving security to the hypervisor layer.

VMware senior director Allwyn Sequeira clarified that VMware’s official position does not recommend taking antivirus tools out of guest operating systems, but he did say that running antivirus in every guest OS is inefficient. Sequeira also said that open source software such as Xen isn’t automatically more secure than proprietary systems such as VMware’s. Crosby pounced on this statement, noting that VMware’s SpringSource software is based on open source.

The comment seemed primarily to be a joke but is indicative of tensions between VMware and its rivals heading into VMworld. Last year, Microsoft claimed new VMworld rules prevented it from exhibiting its System Center Virtual Machine Manager technology at the conference, which VMware hosts, but set up a small booth on the show floor anyway.
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VMware’s new rules prevented vendors from sponsoring VMworld if they are not members of VMware’s Technology Alliance Partner program, but VMware said the rule should not have prevented Microsoft from exhibiting competing products.

VMware said the rule changes were spurred by Microsoft “shenanigans” in 2008, when Microsoft gave attendees poker chips in a package that said “Looking for your best bet? You won’t find it with VMware.”

Conflicts aside, Microsoft and VMware have to work together because customers use the two companies’ technologies in tandem. A VMware customer may not want to virtualize Windows with Hyper-V, but that customer is still using Windows.
As such, VMware’s hypervisor has been certified to work on Windows technology, and customers can call either VMware or Microsoft in case of system failures. “We have mechanisms between the two companies, we can hand off technical support issues between the two companies,” Neil said.
Use of Hyper-V has more than doubled in the past year, but it is still only the third most used hypervisor, after two VMware products: VMware ESX and VMware Server, according to IDC.

While Microsoft has been outspoken in its criticism of VMware, Neil blamed VMware for much of the conflict.

“Obviously VMware has taken sort of an anti-Microsoft MCITP Certification stance, they don’t want to be a partner of ours in the traditional sense,” Neil said. “But like I said it’s the same set of customers, so we’re going to talk to them regardless.”

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Cisco settles antitrust suit over software updates
has settled a 2008 lawsuit in which independent network maintenance company Multiven charged that Cisco forced customers to buy its SMARTnet service plan in order to get bug fixes and software updates.

Multiven agreed to drop its claims against Cisco, and Cisco dropped countersuits against Multiven, network expertise platform Pingsta, and Pingsta founder Peter Alfred-Adekeye. The terms of the settlement were sealed. Each party will pay its own legal costs, according to an order filed July 28. Multiven announced the settlement on Monday Microsoft MCTS Training.
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Cisco vs. Juniper
Multiven provides technical support, maintenance and consulting services for networks from multiple vendors. It sued Cisco in December 2008, charging that the dominant network equipment vendor did not make necessary software updates and bug fixes for its products available to third parties. Instead, Cisco made those updates available only to customers of its SMARTnet service, preventing third parties from servicing Cisco equipment, Multiven alleged. The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, in San Jose.

Pingsta is a collaborative platform designed to let users procure network expertise on a pay-per-use basis from experts who work at will.

Cisco was not immediately available for comment. In December 2008, in response to the suit, the company said its customers were not required to buy Cisco’s services and that thousands of partner companies offered service programs, including bug fixes, for Cisco gear or Microsoft MCITP Certification.

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Microsoft releases Azure cloud platform appliance
With the help of hardware partners, Microsoft MCTS Training has released a version of its Windows Azure cloud platform as an appliance, the company said on Monday during the kickoff of its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) being held this week in Washington D.C.

Microsoft has run a version of its Windows Azure as a service since February, and the company has claimed the service has been used by 10,000 customers. The company is now offering the platform software, packaged with a set of servers.
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In a blog posting, Microsoft server and tools corporate vice president Robert Wahbe, explained that the appliance would provide a means for organizations to run a cloud service, either internally or for their own customers.

“Using it, service providers, governments and large enterprises who would consider buying, say, 1000 servers at a time, will be able to get the control they need,” Wahbe said.

“What we are talking about is a specific locked-down piece of hardware that can represent hundreds of thousands of servers,” said Amy Barzdukas, senior director of product management, in an interview with the IDG News Service. “Like an appliance, it is standardized and turn-key, so customers can deploy the Windows Azure in their data centers.”

Barzdukas said an appliance can be useful for organizations that wish to run their software both internally and on external Azure services, adding that the workload can be easily moved between multiple Azure locations. “It provides scale of the platform, but with the added benefit of control of the location,” she said.

According to Barzdukas, Dell, Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard will each sell a “limited production release” of the appliance, as well as offer an Azure service for their customers. eBay intends to use the appliance for internal operations. A broader release is expected by later this year.

The Azure appliance will have all the functionality with Microsoft’s own Azure service, Barzdukas said.

Microsoft plans to post a new promotional Web page devoted to the offering on Monday. Bob Muglia, Microsoft senior vice president of the server and tools business, is also expected to talk about the appliance at WPC.

In addition to the release of the Azure appliance, Microsoft MCITP Certification also announced that it has shipped the release candidate of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self Service Portal, which is a Windows Server virtualization tool pack, and has released both the beta of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.

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Video previews Microsoft Office 2011 plans

Microsoft has started rolling out more details about Office 2011, the upcoming upgrade of its productivity suite. On Wednesday, the company posted a brief video on its Mac Mojo blog showing off a few of the suite’s new features.

The video–which combines images of the software and interviews with Microsoft MCTS Training developers–highlights three main features: The revamped database and threaded Conversation view in Outlook (which will replace Entourage as Office’s e-mail client); and a new template gallery.
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Changes in Outlook

Microsoft reps say that the database underlying Entourage 2008–which stored your e-mail messages, calendar entries, and contacts in one huge file–was a “pain point” for customers. Among the reasons for the pain: If you made the tiniest change to that database file–by receiving an e-mail message, say, or adding a new phone number–then Time Machine would think it had to back up the whole thing.

In the video, the company sings the virtues of Outlook 2011′s new database structure, in which messages, appointments, and contacts will be contained in discrete files. That should make for smaller and faster backups; it should also make it easier to find Outlook items with Spotlight.

The video also previews that Conversation view, which will enable you to see all the messages in a single thread at the same time, no matter which folder they’re in. You could get something similar in Entourage, but only with much fiddling; it’s now the default view. (You can, of course, opt for the old unthreaded view if you wish.)

Template Gallery

The video also highlights Office 2011′s new template gallery, which is much more elaborate than the Project Gallery in Office 2008.

Instead of showing you low-res thumbnails of templates and themes, the new gallery gives you rich, high-def previews. If a template has multiple pages (the first page might be formatted one way, subsequent pages another), you can preview all of them before you start work. You can also customize the template’s color scheme and font; in PowerPoint, you can set the orientation (Landscape or Portrait).

The template gallery also includes a link to Microsoft’s online template library (which the company says contains thousands of templates, from professional designers as well as regular Office users). The searchable gallery is organized by categories and sports a recent documents list, with links to documents you’ve worked on today, yesterday, or in the past week or month.

Finally, the video offers a glimpse of the previously announced Ribbon, which replaces Office 2008′s Elements Gallery. Like that gallery, the ribbon provides quick access to commonly used tools. Unlike that gallery, you can completely collapse the Ribbon, to reclaim screen space.

Microsoft MCITP Certification hasn’t announced a firm release date for Office 2011 yet, only that it plans to ship some time in the last quarter of 2010. The company hasn’t publicly announced prices, either. But it does plan to release more of these teaser videos in the weeks and months ahead.

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IBM snaps up Storwize
After much anticipation, IBM on Thursday announced its intent to acquire data compression vendor Storwize. Storwize, based in Marlborough, Mass., provides data compression in real-time that can reduce primary data by as much as 80%, according to company claims. The company has been successful in engaging customers such as Shopzill and Sumitomo Mitsuie Construction. Its compression technology can be used on files, VMDK golden images and structured database data without compromising performance Microsoft MCTS Training.

M&As in the IT industry for 2010

IBM will combine Storwize’s technology with its ProtecTIER deduplication appliances, its XIV disk storage and its Scale-Out NAS, as well as incorporate its functionality with IBM System Storage Easy Tier software. The software-based Storwize appliance works with heterogeneous storage from EMC, HP and NetApp.

The deal leaves one vendor, Permabit, in the independent compression business since Dell acquired Ocarina Networks last week. Permabit’s Abireo technology is OEM-focused.

Also in news last week included that Geminare launched Cloud Storage Assurance 2.0, a cloud storage replication product targeted at SMBs. Cloud Storage Assurance 2.0 now offers secure data backup and auditability through its Cloud Recovery Server Replication service. Auditability is done through authentication of data using a key identifier for each file. Cloud Assurance also allow archiving of file data automatically and provides a RESTful-base API kit that lets vendors write custom queries and integrate their document management and eDiscovery applications with Cloud Assurance Microsoft MCITP Certification.

Geminare sells Cloud Assurance through a network of service providers, MSPs and VARs. It runs Cloud Assurance on the Amazon S3, Atmos Partners or Iron Mountain Archive Service clouds.

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Microsoft to issue patch for dangerous USB rootkit hole
Microsoft MCTS Training on Tuesday will release a rare out-of-band patch to fix the highly dangerous zero-day vulnerability  that has caused multiple researchers to issuing warnings earlier this month. The patch will be for all supported versions of Windows and will require a restart.

As I previously wrote about, the exploit is a whopper on all levels. It comes into the enterprise via hidden files on USB sticks or via shared network files. It requires no user interaction to infect the system (simply viewing the icon is enough to trigger it). It propagates itself. It loads as a rootkit infection. It affects all Windows operating systems, even full-patched Windows 7 systems. It seems to target extremely sensitive information — researchers say it seems to have been made for espionage. If all that weren’t scary enough, a researcher has already published proof-of-concept code.

The attack exploits a vulnerability in Windows Shell, a component of Microsoft Windows. Although many anti-virus software makers claimed that they were able to update their wares to detect the rootkit, security experts remained highly concerned about the hole, as did Microsoft MCITP Certification. In a blog post today, Christopher Budd, Sr. Security Response Communications Manager at Microsoft, explained, “we’re able to confirm that, in the past few days, we’ve seen an increase in attempts to exploit the vulnerability.”

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Microsoft slates IE9 beta for September
MIcrosoft will ship a beta of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) in September, a company executive said today.

If the timeline is accurate, the IE9 beta release will come a month later than earlier speculation, which had settled on August, a pick based in large part on PowerPoint slides purportedly from a Microsoft MCTS Training presentation that focused on Windows 8 , the next iteration of the company’s OS.
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Today, Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer, said that IE9 would reach beta this fall. “We’re really excited about IE9, which will be beta and coming out in September,” said Turner during the company’s annual day-long presentation to Wall Street analysts.

Turner also boasted of Internet Explorer’s recent turnaround, claiming that it had gained usage share the last two months.

According to Web analytics company Net Applications, IE did increase its global share by a record six-tenths of a percentage point during June. However, Net Applications had IE losing, not gaining, ground worldwide in May.

As of June 30, IE accounted for an estimated 60.3% of all browsers used during the month.

Since March, when the company debuted a rough-around-the-edges IE9 developer preview, the company has updated the bare-bones browser twice, most recently in late June .

After Turner’s announcement of a September beta for IE9, Microsoft declined to answer additional questions, including when during the month users could expect the more stable preview, or whether the beta would be open to everyone, as the developer previews have been.

“We do not have any additional specifics to share at this time about when Internet Explorer 9 Beta will be available,” a company spokeswoman said.

Microsoft has also refused to name a release schedule for the final build of IE9. Most pundits now believe Microsoft won’t wrap up the browser until 2011.

That will be the case if Microsoft MCITP Certification mimics the timeline it used for Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), which reached the beta milestone in March 2008 but didn’t ship until March 2009 .

Using IE8′s schedule as a guide, users can expect to see the final version of IE9 in September 2011.

IE9 will run on Windows Vista and Windows 7 , but not on Windows XP, the nearly-nine-year-old operating system that still accounts for 68% of all versions of Windows still in use.

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Microsoft to issue patch for dangerous USB rootkit hole
Microsoft on Tuesday will release a rare out-of-band patch to fix the highly dangerous zero-day vulnerability  that has caused multiple researchers to issuing warnings earlier this month. The patch will be for all supported versions of Windows and will require a restart.

As I previously wrote about, the exploit is a whopper on all levels. It comes into the enterprise via hidden files on USB sticks or via shared network files. It requires no user interaction to infect the system (simply viewing the icon is enough to trigger it). It propagates itself. It loads as a rootkit infection. It affects all Windows operating systems, even full-patched Windows 7 systems. It seems to target extremely sensitive information — researchers say it seems to have been made for espionage. If all that weren’t scary enough, a researcher has already published proof-of-concept code.

The attack exploits a vulnerability in Windows Shell, a component of Microsoft MCTS Training Windows. Although many anti-virus software makers claimed that they were able to update their wares to detect the rootkit, security experts remained highly concerned about the hole, as did Microsoft. In a blog post today, Christopher Budd, Sr. Security Response Communications Manager at Microsoft, explained, “we’re able to confirm that, in the past few days, we’ve seen an increase in attempts to exploit the vulnerability.”

Microsoft MCITP Certification will also hold a special edition of the bulletin release webcast on Monday, August 2, 2010 at 1:00 PM PDT. If you are interested in attending the webcast, click here to sign up.

Other articles Network World has published that discusses the attacks include:

Can Microsoft imitate Apple one more time
Remember back in early June when Steve Ballmer said the Apple iPad was “just another PC”? He’d like to amend that slightly to “just another PC that’s now kicking our a**.”

In a meeting with analysts yesterday, Ballmer spent a fair amount of time talking about Apple’s iPad and trying to explain why there are no Microsoft-based devices that remotely compare to it.
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[ Also on InfoWorld: Cringely is nothing if not an equal-opportunity satirist, as he proves in "Apple's Steve Jobs: He's no Old Spice Guy" | Stay up to date on all Robert X. Cringely's observations with InfoWorld's Notes from the Underground newsletter. ]

Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt distills the Ballmer discussion of the iPad into 11 words: “We’ll talk about slates and tablets and blah, blah, blah, blah.” (Apparently, Ballmer is also adopting the Steve Jobs 11-word rule.)

The “blah blah blah” part included a) an admission that the iPad has sold “more than I’d like them to sell,” b) “we’re coming full guns” to the slate market, and c) they’ll be “coming when they’re ready” — so don’t bother camping in line outside any Microsoft stores just yet. (Greg Packer, this means you.)

Meanwhile, the one Windows-based slate Ballmer could dig up to demo at last January’s CES — and got virtually heckled off the stage by the blogosphere afterward — may end up not being a Windows device after all. Now that HP has gobbled up Palm, its Slate PC may run Palm’s WebOS, a much more attractive tablet interface than Windows 7. Given how badly HP got jobbed by Microsoft MCTS Training during the whole “Vista ready” labeling debacle, I imagine this would be sweet revenge.

So, once again, Microsoft finds itself in the position of needing to imitate Apple to stay relevant.

Of course, imitation is part of Microsoft’s DNA. Copy something successful, then ram it down people’s throats. CP/M becomes MS-DOS, the Mac GUI gets reborn as Windows, though maybe “stillborn” is closer — it took Redmond 11 years to come up with an interface that approached the Mac’s features and simplicity. Intuit’s Quicken begets Microsoft Money. The iPod spawns the Zune. And so on down the line.

I’m not saying Microsoft has not come up with some innovations over the last 35 years. I still think Excel is the best software Redmond ever made. The Xbox, Microsoft Surface, Project Natal — er, Kinect — are all first rate. But its bread-and-butter strategy continues to be “imitate, then destroy.” And that strategy has grown less successful over time.

Now Microsoft has to play catchup to the iPad, as well as the 3,247 Android-based tablets we’ll be seeing over the next 12 months. Given how long it’s taking Redmond to catch up on cell phones, it may be two years before we see any tablets worth talking about. By then, it will be too late.

Still, this could explain Microsoft’s new slogan, unveiled at its annual Microsoft MCITP Certification Global Exchange confab last week: Be What’s Next. In this case, what’s “next” is Apple, a company it seems Microsoft now desperately needs to become.

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Microsoft Get Back to Work
Steve Ballmer assured analysts and the world that Microsoft MCTS Training is hard at work developing a Windows 7-based tablet to compete with devices like the Apple iPad. It is also putting the finishing touches on Windows Phone 7, and preparing to launch the innovative Kinect controller for the Xbox 360. The problem for Microsoft is that these are not its bread and butter markets, and its dominance with business customers is slowly slipping away while it dabbles in consumer gadgets.

Microsoft has always had a consumer side. Microsoft Windows has been established as the de facto consumer desktop operating system. Internet Explorer enjoys a dominant market share among Web browsers. Still, it seems that most of the efforts Microsoft makes in the consumer market are unsuccessful.
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Some Microsoft consumer technologies–like the Zune music player–have been technically sound, yet have failed to capture the attention of consumers or dent the dominance of the Apple iPod. Other consumer technologies–such as the Xbox 360–are a success in the market now, but operated at a loss for so many years that breaking even probably won’t happen soon. Then there are the abject failures like Microsoft BOB, or the recently executed Kin social phone.

Microsoft, Google, and Apple seem to all suffer from such an intense desire to dominate markets and crush the competition that they jump into every market at once and end up doing a half-assed job at everything rather than a focused and excellent job developing the products and services their brands were built on. It’s a sort of “throw every gadget, application, and technology at the wall and see what sticks” business strategy.

Historically speaking, fighting a war on too many fronts simultaneously is almost always a fatal flaw. It spreads valuable resources too thin, resulting in weakness, and eventually collapse. Just ask Napoleon.

Does Microsoft need a tablet? Will Windows Phone 7 be a success? Mobile platforms like tablets and smartphones are a computing revolution that Microsoft can’t ignore, but Microsoft needs to be sure it is looking beyond the impulse to compete for the sake of competing, and that its tablet and smartphone efforts fit into a larger strategic vision that makes sense.

Microsoft holds a virtual monopoly on the desktop operating system, and office productivity software markets, as well as a comfortably dominant position with Internet Explorer and Microsoft Exchange. Instead of consumer-oriented products like music players, and gaming consoles, Microsoft should focus its efforts on its core business customers.

At the same time, though, Microsoft can’t expect to just coast on the coattails of its former glory and rely solely on those products–at least not the way they are today. Microsoft needs to look at the direction technology is going–virtualization, cloud, mobility–and figure out how to adapt its core portfolio to continue meeting its customers’ needs in an evolving marketplace.

Microsoft has those efforts going as well with Azure, and the recently-unveiled Windows Azure Platform appliance. But–if Microsoft MCITP Certification would focus its resources on initiatives like that rather than consumer gadgets it might have much greater odds of success.

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Microsoft wins a Pwnie for failure
Microsoft has earned the dubious distinction of having the Most Epic FAIL of the last year in computer security with a browser cross-site scripting (XSS) filter that actually exacerbated the problem.

The company was given the award at the conclusion of the annual Blackhat 2010 security conference Wednesday in Las Vegas. I wasn’t there so I don’t know if anyone from Microsoft MCTS Training stepped up to accept the award, head perhaps covered by a paper bag.

According to a white paper produced by researchers Eduardo Vela Nava and David Lindsay, Internet Explorer 8 implemented an anti-XSS mechanism to detect such attacks. Here’s the funny part: “This feature can be abused by attackers in order to enable XSS on web sites and web pages that would otherwise be immune to XSS,” the researchers noted.

I’m not sure if he was specifically referencing the IE 8 XSS fail, but Kevin Turner, chief operating officer for Microsoft, said this during an analyst conference this morning in Redmond: “Yes, we had a little headwinds. We had several things we had to do with IE 8 this past year,” Turner said, right after describing the product as “the safest, most secure browser in the marketplace.”

Maybe now it is.

Microsoft beat out McAfee and IBM in the Most Epic FAIL category: McAfee for issuing an anti-virus update in April that rendered hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide inoperable; and IBM for handing out free USB drives at a conference loaded with malware.

The only other Microsoft mention was a Pwnie for Best Privilege Escalation Bug and this award went to Tavis Ormandy, the researcher who discovered it in multiple operating systems from Windows NT 3.1 to Windows 7. In awarding the Pwnie to Ormandy, Blackhat stated: “This privilege escalation bug required more than a few tricks to exploit. Its discovery shows a rare understanding of some of the more obscure aspects of the Intel architecture.”

Microsoft MCITP Certification was nominated, but failed to win — or should I say failed to lose — in the categories of Best Server-Side Bug and Best Client-Side Bug. Again, in these categories, the Pwnies went to the people who discovered the bugs, not the companies that created them.

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Adobe joins Microsoft’s patch-reporting program
Adobe and Microsoft are now working together to give security companies a direct line into their bug-fixing efforts.

By year’s end, Adobe will start using the Microsoft MCTS Training Active Protections Program (MAPP) to share details on its latest patches, according to Brad Arkin, Adobe’s director of product security and privacy. “The MAPP program is the gold standard for how the software vendors should be sharing information about product vulnerabilities prior to shipping security updates,” he said.
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Adobe initially wanted to reproduce MAPP, but soon realized that it would take a lot of work to build a program similar to Microsoft’s, which was piloted two years ago. Arkin’s team began discussions with Microsoft, at first in hopes of picking up some tips. “Eventually, together, we came to the conclusion that it would be a lot more fun to work together on this rather than Microsoft helping us to reinvent the wheel,” he said.

Typically, whenever a major patch is released, hackers quickly begin to analyze the patch to see what flaws were fixed. They then rush to work out attacks that would exploit the vulnerability on unpatched products.

Adobe has been hit hard in the past two years by hackers who have found bug after bug in the company’s products. This often means hard work for security companies, who must scramble to add detection for these attacks.

It’s become so bad that one security company, SourceFire, is holding an exclusive Adobe Hater’s Ball on Wednesday here at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

The Ball is really a tongue-in-cheek joke, modelled on comedian Dave Chappelle’s Playa Hater’s Ball.

“My guys have a love-hate relationship with the guys over at Adobe,” said SourceFire Director Matt Watchinski. “Every time a vulnerability comes out of their stuff, we have to jump.”

Arkin said he and other Adobe researchers will be at the event.

With Adobe jointing the MAPP program, however, security companies like SourceFire should do less scrambling.

MAPP gives them early notice on upcoming patches — typically about 48 hours — so they have more time to build attack detection into their security systems. About 65 security companies participate in MAPP. All of them will soon start getting the Adobe data.

This is the first time that Microsoft MCITP Certification has extended the MAPP program to cover another company’s products, said Dave Forstrom, a director with Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group.

However, it may not be the last. Forstrom didn’t rule out the possibility that other software vendors could also jump on board.

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Drop responsible from bug disclosures Microsoft urges

Microsoft today pitched its own proposal for how software makers react to bugs reported by researchers, calling for a name change to describe the process it prefers.

Rather than dub the back-and-forth between bug finders and vendors “responsible disclosure” — a term that implies that the researcher reports a bug, then waits for the developer to patch it before going public with news of the flaw — Microsoft MCTS Training wants everyone in the security community to use a different moniker: “coordinated vulnerability disclosure,” or CVD.
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The company admitted the move is primarily a name change, and that much of the rest of its proposal is what Microsoft has urged in the past.

“This isn’t a drastic departure at all,” said Mike Reavey, director of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), Microsoft’s in-house security team. “What we want to do is what works best to minimize risk to customers, and to remove emotion, which isn’t helpful to anyone.”

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Reavey argued, as others have before, that “responsible disclosure” is a loaded name, since by implication anyone who doesn’t follow its bug-reporting steps — going public with details or attack code before a patch is ready — is by implication labeled as “irresponsible.”

“[CVD] is the same thing as responsible disclosure, just renamed,” repeated Reavey. “When folks use charged words, a lot of the focus then is on the disclosure, and not on the problem at hand, which is to make sure customers are protected, and that attacks are not amplified.”

Other than the name change, Microsoft’s proposal — which was spelled out in several blog posts by company executives, including the most detailed by Katie Moussouris, a senior security strategist on the MSRC ecosystem strategy team — is essentially a more explicit rendering of previous positions and practices.

One of the key points Microsoft made is that it wants to keep the lines of communication open between itself and security researchers, even when the latter broadcast their findings without reporting a bug to Microsoft or waiting on a patch.

“We want to be more clear about our philosophy, so first, we would appreciate a heads-up, even if the researcher does ‘full disclosure,’” said Reavey, referring to the label applied when a bug hunter goes public with all the details he has about a vulnerability before a patch is available. “And two, that we’ve operated this way before, so that if a vulnerability is under attack, certainly, we’ll release some information and advice.”

Moussouris echoed Reavey in her blog. “For finders who still believe that full disclosure is the best way to protect users, we respectfully disagree, but we still want to work with you if you’re willing,” she said. “We’d encourage folks who support [full disclosure] to still contact us, as we can then attempt to coordinate release of information with protections that are available.”

Microsoft isn’t the first to propose changes to the sometimes-rocky relationships between security researchers and the vendors whose products they label as vulnerable to attack.

On Tuesday, Google published what it called “Rebooting Responsible Disclosure,” a proposal that featured, among other elements, a call for a hard deadline of 60 days to patch a problem.
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Reavey disagreed with Google. “I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all-issues as far as a timeline,” he said. “If the update doesn’t work, it doesn’t protect anyone.”

Microsoft has long taken the position that it fixes bugs as fast as it can, but that testing the quality of an update is just as critical as patching. Screwing up a patch, said Reavey, can have an enormous impact on Windows users, who often apply the updates without testing them themselves.

John Pescatore, Gartner’s primary analyst on security issues, took Microsoft’s side, saying that Google’s proposal was colored by the fact that most of its software is in the cloud, and that the most prominent exception, its Chrome browser, is simple in comparison to an operating system like Windows.

“Browsers are not typical of lots and lots of legacy software, like Microsoft’s or Oracle’s,” Pescatore said, adding that it’s unrealistic to expect every bug to get fixed in two months.

“There’s often a six-month time frame for an enterprise before they can even push patches [within their organization], even after a patch is released,” Pescatore said. “There’s all kinds of code that’s not as simple to patch as a browser, and that requires longer delays before a patch can be implemented.”

The Microsoft and Google proposals are the latest in an increasingly-heated discussion among researchers and vendors about disclosure that was prompted in part by an incident last month when a Google security engineer went public with a critical Windows bug just five days after reporting it to Microsoft.

In early June, Tavis Ormandy, who works for Google’s Switzerland office, published attack code for a Windows XP vulnerability, and immediately unleashed a heated debate. While some security researchers criticized Ormandy for taking the bug public, others rose to his defense, blasting both Microsoft and the press — including Computerworld — for linking Ormandy to his employer.

Ormandy said he disclosed the vulnerability five days after reporting it to Microsoft when the company wouldn’t commit to a patching deadline. Microsoft has disputed that, claiming that it only told Ormandy it would need the rest of the week to decide.

Reavey denied that today’s change was triggered by the Ormandy disclosure, saying that Microsoft MCITP Certification had been thinking about CVD for months, and had been working with outside researchers and security experts long before the June brouhaha.

But Reavey did admit that things might have worked out differently if the CVD philosophy had been in place last month. “We might have been more clear that we wanted to work together on this,” Reavey said. “That [event] was difficult for all of us. [With CVD], we want to explicitly make sure we communicate that we want to continue the dialog.”

Reactions by researchers to Microsoft’s name change and Google’s earlier 60-day deadline idea was mixed.

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Microsoft cloud strategy A question of feature parity
Microsoft often uses the phrase “feature parity” to describe its vision of providing cloud computing services that closely replicate the capabilities customers can already get by installing Microsoft software inside their firewalls. After all, Microsoft is “all in” for the cloud, as Steve Ballmer says.

While Microsoft’s hosted Exchange and SharePoint will achieve most of the desired feature parity within the next year, Microsoft admits it has no plans today to provide the same parity with Office Web Apps, the Web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
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Office Web Apps, released in June, provides a “high-fidelity viewing experience,” but only limited editing capabilities, says Evan Lew, senior product manager for Microsoft Office.

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Lew blames the disparity on the limitations of current Web browsers (of which the most widely used is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer).

“It has to do with the capabilities of the Web browser and the limitations today,” Lew says.

With the addition of HTML5 “the lines [between PC and browser] may start blurring,” he continues, but as of “today, there are performance reasons why editing, video and PowerPoint is something that is a much better experience in the client than in the browser.”

Microsoft touts the ability to import Office documents into Office Web Apps without losing formatting — a supposed advantage over Google Apps — but editing scenarios like inserting charts or pivot tables into Excel and editing videos require the horsepower of the PC and native desktop client, Lew says.

Microsoft is meeting the challenge from Google Apps by providing some online capabilities, but likely doesn’t want to give businesses a completely Web-based alternative to replace the more expensive Office, Forrester Research analyst Sheri McLeish said in a recent interview.

“They’re walking a very fine line,” McLeish says. “While they’re nervous and worried [about Google Apps], they’re not nervous and worried enough to dramatically reduce the cost of Office. They’re delicately managing the pricing to protect their margins.”

Regular Office licenses give customers rights to use Web Apps, but a full-fledged cloud offering “is not going to happen in 2010,” McLeish says.

Things are a bit different on the hosted Exchange and SharePoint front, at least according to Microsoft’s spokespeople.
Formally known as BPOS, the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, Microsoft’s hosted Exchange and SharePoint is still running on the 2007 servers.  But a planned upgrade to the 2010 servers will erase most of the feature differences between the hosted and on-premise versions, according to Microsoft.

We’re working toward a goal we call service parity,” says John Betz, director of product management for Microsoft Online Services.
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Customization is limited today, because the 2007 servers don’t fully embrace the concept of multi-tenancy, Betz says. With the 2010 rollout, customers will have access to the My Sites feature, which lets them run code in a sandbox, a separate process that has limited access rights and wouldn’t be able to take down an entire server farm.

Not every feature in BPOS will be exactly the same as the on-premise version, however. For example, BPOS support for data protected by ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) is available only for government agencies. Also, customers need their own PBX system when they integrate voice capabilities with Office Communications Online, because of network latency issues.

Another BPOS limitation, mentioned in a recent Microsoft blog, is lack of support for the Office 2003 client.

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“We won’t achieve complete feature parity,” because certain processes need to run on a customer’s own servers, for a variety of reasons, Betz says.

In addition to BPOS, there are other examples of Microsoft trying to provide similar functionality in the cloud as they do in packaged software. The next version of Microsoft’s CRM product will let IT customize their CRM deployments in the cloud the same way they can on-premise, for example with complex .NET programs, says Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft’s CRM business.

Microsoft has also turned some of its cloud capabilities into on-premise technology with the Windows Azure Platform appliance, which lets businesses run an Azure-like private cloud within their firewalls.

Why does BPOS get a better “feature parity” treatment than Office Web Apps? With BPOS, Microsoft is operating the backend servers on a customer’s behalf, in the cloud, in much the same way customers would operate the servers themselves.
“With SharePoint, the SharePoint navigation experience manifests itself in the browser whether it’s on-premise or hosted in Microsoft MCITP Certification [data center],” Lew notes.

Tim O’Brien, senior director of Microsoft’s Platform Strategy Group, recalls showing BPOS to a customer at a conference:

“He’s looking somewhat underwhelmed during the demo, and he shrugged his shoulders and he said ‘it’s just SharePoint.’ But that’s exactly the point. Your investment in SharePoint moves forward.”

But Office Web Apps, which requires a SharePoint 2010 back end, isn’t likely to offer the same functionality as Office on-premise anytime soon. Although Lew promises improvement, he says it’s too early to say what features will be added. Complete replication of features across the online and on-premise versions of Office is not being promised by Microsoft, at least today.

“We don’t really see Office Web Apps as a replacement scenario,” Lew says. “It’s really more of a companion for people who already use Office.”

The largest cloud customers have received the 2010 upgrade already, a broader preview will be available later in 2010, and full general availability is expected in 2011.

Upgrades in 2010 server rollout that will bring BPOS closer to feature parity, include getting voice mails in e-mail inboxes, role-based access controls, single-sign-on between on-premise and cloud, and the ability to upload custom code to SharePoint Online.

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Microsoft working on patch for critical Windows vulnerability
Microsoft signed a new agreement to license technology for the Arm microprocessor architecture, opening the potential for the software giant to follow in Apple’s footsteps and design its own Arm-based chips.

The new license greatly extends the technologies Microsoft MCTS Training can make use of from Arm Holdings. The companies have collaborated for years on software and devices mainly in mobile, consumer and embedded products.
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“We have licensed our architecture and our instruction set to Microsoft,” said Ian Drew, executive vice president of marketing at Arm. “This type of license allows you to design your own microarchitecture.”

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Only a select group of companies hold similar licenses to design their own Arm-based microarchitectures, including mobile phone chip giant Qualcomm, as well as Marvell Technology and Infineon Technologies.

“As an architectural licensee, Microsoft wants to go public about adding itself to that short list,” Drew said.

Arm Holdings licenses Arm technology to a number of companies around the world. Arm-based microprocessors are found in the majority of the world’s smartphones. Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has developed its Atom microprocessors in the hope of someday rivaling Arm-based microprocessors in smartphones and other small devices.

Microsoft and Arm said the size and scope of the deal are confidential.

“Arm is an important partner for Microsoft MCITP Certification and we deliver multiple operating systems on the company’s architecture, most notably Windows Embedded and Windows Phone,” Microsoft said in a statement.

Closer access to Arm technology gives Microsoft the ability to enhance its research and development around Arm-based products, the statement said.

A number of companies custom-design chips to meet the specific needs of a device or software. Apple said it custom-designed its A4 chip for the iPad and iPhone 4 to be more powerful for multitasking and yet extremely battery-efficient.

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Microsoft posts record revenue, thumbs nose at Apple
So this won’t be the quarter that Apple sells more stuff than Microsoft. Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) eked out slightly more revenue than Apple, and billions more in profit. Microsoft  MCTS Training reported another record quarter for its fiscal fourth-quarter that ended June 30. The company booked 16.04 billion in revenue, a 22% increase from the year ago period. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $5.93 billion, $4.52 billion and $0.51 per share, which represented increases of 49%, 48% and 50%, respectively, when compared with the prior year period.

In comparison while Apple also posted record revenue, it booked $15.7 billion in revenue with a net quarterly profit of $3.25 billion, or $3.51 per diluted share.

Microsoft gives most of the credit to Windows 7 which it says has sold more than 175 million licenses to date.

On the downside, looks like the failed Kin phone could have cost Microsoft about a quarter of a billion dollars. Microsoft notes: “Cost of revenue increased $584 million or 23%, primarily reflecting increased online costs, increased royalty costs and charges resulting from the discontinuation of the KIN phone.” And then it gets more specific when reporting the losses the Entertainment & Devices Division racked up, the unit responsible for the Kin. The division lost $172 million in the final quarter. Microsoft says, “Cost of revenue increased $251 million or 38% primarily from charges resulting from the discontinuation of the KIN phone and increased royalty costs resulting from increased Xbox LIVE digital marketplace third-party content sales.”

While the unit did manage to increase its profits over the course of the year, it didn’t increase revenue. Microsoft was able to offset a lot of the failed Kin cost and show that year-end profit in that unit because it reduced costs associated with building Xbox 360 consoles and also because it had “reductions in other costs due to resource management efforts.”

Could this statement reflect the fact that several extremely high paid executives in the Entertainment & Devices Division were shown the door? President Robbie Bach announced his exodus in May. Shockingly Bach was Microsoft’s highest paid exec. He earned over $6 million in 2009, and was paid the largest cash bonus, of more than $1.1 million.

Likewise, J Allard also announced in May that he’s leaving, though technically he’s staying on until the fall. Allard was Chief Experience Officer and Chief Technology Officer, Entertainment and Devices Division, and best known for championing the Xbox as a platform for social networking and online functionality. His exodus was a surprise to many since Xbox Live — the console’s online capabilities — has finally made the game console a hit. And users are fairly excited about the up-and-coming Kinnect gesture based interface.

Still, it is frustrating to see Microsoft pour this much money and effort into an Entertainment & Devices Division only to wind up alienating the young, hip customers it is trying to woo. Who pays for that? You, the enterprise customer, does. The $5.93 billion in operating profit comes from its software users, mostly the business users.

As evidence, Microsoft Office 2010 was praised for its contribution to the great quarter, as users were stopped from buying Word 2007 due to a court injunction forbidding the sale of it. Microsoft lost a patent infringement lawsuit which caused the injunction. Consumers bought an additional $357 million worth of Office 2010 products in the third quarter than they did the previous quarter (presumably with all those new Windows 7 PCs). All told, Microsoft raked in $5.25 billion in the division that sells Office. Of that $3.28 was operating income — about half the total operating profit that Microsoft reported.

Microsoft MCITP Certification has not yet released its audited financial report to the SEC, so these figures are based on the press release. I’ll be looking at the formal documents after they post to see what else can be gleaned about Microsoft’s past, present and future.

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Microsoft signs big licensing deal for Arm chip technology

Microsoft signed a new agreement to license technology for the Arm microprocessor architecture, opening the potential for the software giant to follow in Apple’s footsteps and design its own Arm-based chips.

The new license greatly extends the technologies Microsoft MCTS Training can make use of from Arm Holdings. The companies have collaborated for years on software and devices mainly in mobile, consumer and embedded products.
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“We have licensed our architecture and our instruction set to Microsoft,” said Ian Drew, executive vice president of marketing at Arm. “This type of license allows you to design your own microarchitecture.”

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Only a select group of companies hold similar licenses to design their own Arm-based microarchitectures, including mobile phone chip giant Qualcomm, as well as Marvell Technology and Infineon Technologies.

“As an architectural licensee, Microsoft wants to go public about adding itself to that short list,” Drew said.

Arm Holdings licenses Arm technology to a number of companies around the world. Arm-based microprocessors are found in the majority of the world’s smartphones. Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has developed its Atom microprocessors in the hope of someday rivaling Arm-based microprocessors in smartphones and other small devices.

Microsoft and Arm said the size and scope of the deal are confidential.

“Arm is an important partner for Microsoft MCITP Certification and we deliver multiple operating systems on the company’s architecture, most notably Windows Embedded and Windows Phone,” Microsoft said in a statement.

Closer access to Arm technology gives Microsoft the ability to enhance its research and development around Arm-based products, the statement said.

A number of companies custom-design chips to meet the specific needs of a device or software. Apple said it custom-designed its A4 chip for the iPad and iPhone 4 to be more powerful for multitasking and yet extremely battery-efficient.

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Microsoft licences ARM architecture
Microsoft and ARM have signed a new deal that will see the technology giant licence the ARM architecture Microsoft MCTS Training.

The deal marks the first time Microsoft has full access to ARM’s architecture. Previously, Microsoft and ARM have worked together on building mobile and embedded operating systems for devices featuring ARM processors.
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The only other two firms to licence the ARM architecture, chip manufactures Qualcomm and Marvell.

It is thought Microsoft may use the licence to develop a version of its Windows OS to work smoothly with ARM processors, which currently feature in a number of low-power PCs, such as netbooks and tablets.

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“ARM is an important partner for Microsoft and we deliver multiple operating systems on the company’s architecture, most notably Windows Embedded and Windows Phone,” said KD Hallman, general manager, Microsoft

“With closer access to the ARM technology we will be able to enhance our research and development activities for ARM-based products.”

Mike Muller, CTO at ARM, added that Microsoft has been an important member of the ARM ecosystem for many years Microsoft MCITP Certification.

“With this architecture license, Microsoft will be at the forefront of applying and working with ARM technology in concert with a broad range of businesses addressing multiple application areas,” said Muller.

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Avaya stares down Microsoft, Cisco
While Avaya’s contact center and unified communications announcements last week signal the company wants a dominant position in those areas, it faces internal challenges and formidable competitors including Microsoft MCTS Training and Cisco.

The company is in the midst of digesting and integrating Nortel’s enterprise division, which it bought last year for $900 million and from which it expects to reap big returns by next spring. At the same time, it is dealing with the same generally soft economy that other vendors are — though Cisco is registering surprisingly strong revenue gains.
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The Avaya FAQ

Avaya’s CEO says the next six to nine months are critical as it tries to integrate the former Nortel Enterprise division — including network infrastructure and business telephony — into its fold. The purchase was finalized last December, so the company has just completed its second full quarter since the acquisition. “On most operational details we have the normal first quarter challenges from shipments and logistics. Second quarter things are feeling pretty good, and the litmus test is ahead of us,” CEO Kevin Kennedy told Network World in an interview at Avaya’s offices.

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That test is whether the company can nail down significant long-term commitments from Nortel telephony and contact center customers and lock them into a migration toward Avaya UC. At the heart of that challenge is convincing Nortel customers to buy Avaya Aura, the company’s flagship communications server. With Aura customers can step into IP telephony, glue together disparate VoIP systems and — most significantly for Avaya — lay the foundation for adopting UC.

Kennedy says Aura can support Session Initiation Protocol trunking immediately to bring cost savings to corporations and over time bring increased productivity that will save money long-term but might have a longer return on investment Microsoft MCITP Certification.

He acknowledges that getting Nortel communications customers interested in sticking with Avaya as they make plans for transitions to UC is key. The company is trying to draw them in with a flurry of announcements about new products, product enhancements and integrations with Nortel products. “This period right now is about bringing a lot of innovation to market. Now the question will be, are our customers as excited about it as we are?” he asks.

The stakes are high since just 17% of Avaya accounts overlap with Nortel’s, and competitors are gunning for the rest with attractive deals. “These customers are a pretty loyal base,” says Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with Yankee Group. “But they’re loyal to Nortel, not Avaya.” Historically, until Cisco entered the VoIP market, very few telephony customers shifted from one vendor to another, Kerravala says, and the recent turmoil of Nortel’s bankruptcy and Avaya’s purchase of its telephony business puts Nortel customers in play.

Surprisingly, the purchase of Nortel by Avaya didn’t result in Avaya catapulting to the top of the IP telephony market as some analysts expected. With Nortel and Avaya ranking solidly among the top five for years with very nearly equal shares of the market led people to think combining the two would result in a formidable lead for Avaya, says Matthius Machowinski, an analyst with Infonetics. “We expected them to be ahead of everyone else,” he says.

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