[ISN] Microsoft to Show Vista at Hacker Conference

From: InfoSec News (alerts@private)
Date: Tue Jul 11 2006 - 22:45:37 PDT


http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,126380,00.asp

Dan Nystedt
IDG News Service
July 11, 2006

Microsoft plans to give a hacker conference in Asia an inside look at new 
security features on Windows Vista later this year, the organizer of the 
event said today.

The company's commitment to show off Vista to the hacker and security 
community is part of a long-term trend aimed at gaining greater feedback 
from users prior to product debuts. More and more software and hardware 
vendors are trying to weed out vulnerabilities before products go to 
market, and they often turn to the underground and above ground security 
community for advice.

"Companies know that fixing vulnerabilities in already released products 
is always going to be much more expensive than finding and squashing them 
during the development stage," said Dhillon Andrew Kannabhiran, organizer 
of the 6th annual Hack In The Box deep knowledge security conference 
(HITBSecConf2006) set for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in September.

"At the end of the day it also doesn't help an organization's image when 
critical bugs are found which could have been trivially fixed from the 
start," he added.


Talking Points

The Hack In The Box conference will host two speakers from Microsoft.

The first, Dave Tamasi, a lead security program manager at Microsoft, will 
give a presentation on security engineering in Vista. The talk will 
include a discussion about features suggested by hackers and other 
security conscious members of the computing community, in addition to 
security improvements made on Vista.

The second speaker, Douglas MacIver, a penetration engineer at Microsoft, 
will review Vista's BitLocker Drive Encryption and the company's analysis 
of threats and attempts to penetrate the security feature.

BitLocker Drive Encryption is a data protection feature in Windows Vista 
aimed at securing data on lost or stolen computing devices. It's available 
in Windows Vista Enterprise and Ultimate for client computers and Windows 
Server "Longhorn." The software works by preventing an intruder or thief 
from running a software hacking tool to break Windows Vista files and 
system protections, or viewing files stored on the protected files when 
the computer is offline.


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