Technology Competitors Band Together For A Common Cause

Normally in business, competitors seek to outdo each other. Whoever ends up on top, the competitor who brings their service or product to the market first, usually wins. Sometimes there are circumstances where it is better to work together as a cohesive unit rather than go head to head against one another. Microsoft has recently announced that various technology competitors will work together in order to strengthen defenses and fight against the continuing struggle and threat of hackers and cyber criminals.

Dave Forstrom, a director for Microsoft, stated, “Viewing the industry as a whole, there is a need for responsibility to be shared.” At the most recent Las Vegas Black Hat security convention, Microsoft revealed strategies that were started two years ago to bring software vendors, various users, and others together as a group with a common cause. Currently there are approximately sixty five organizations across the globe who are part of the platform entitled the Microsoft Active Protections Program. As Dave Forstrom noted, “This now brings a stronger advantage from the cyber hackers to those who defend. Before this program security fixes are released every week, and there was a struggle between us and the hackers, reverse engineering their attacks and trying to create a fix or a patch as quickly as humanly possible.”

By releasing patches to the general public simultaneously, it also allow hackers a certain time frame that they took advantage of until users were able to apply the vulnerability fix. With this program initiative our side now has a faster start to create or install the security fixes before the other side could create their own attack targeting the security hole. Microsoft has also initiated an index of how critical the vulnerabilities are and the threat they pose in order to allow organizations to place a priority on a response, as well as locate any vulnerabilities they may have in third-party applications. Adobe is one such company that has recently joined the Microsoft platform. This action will allow Adobe's Reader and Flash to become more secure. Brad Arkin, an Adobe senior director within product security and privacy, said, “Software vendors previously had no choice but to wait until an update was published, then commenced a race against hackers who try to take advantage of the vulnerability. Now with the window of opportunity growing smaller, the Microsoft platform has shown us it is well worth it.” Since partnering up with the Microsoft initiative is now taking the Adobe team to learn about new attacks and breaches in seconds instead of a matter of weeks. “Customers do not care about the competitiveness between businesses and rivals. They care that we are working in unison and are doing the best job we can and creating defenses and supporting them.”

Microsoft is also brought up an idea and standard that would inquire those that discover a vulnerability to allow the creators of software applications and opportunity to fix it before alerting the general population. Forstrom noted, “at the convention there will be debates between us and the hackers but everyone should focus upon the facts. Cyber criminals are the enemies we need to defeat.”

The Internet as a whole has also seen recent revisions and upgrades that will prevent cyber criminals from employing a fake and malicious website that will fool users into downloading malware or giving up their personal information. VeriSign and the United States Department of Commerce has teamed up with the Internet management agency in creating identification for websites in an encrypted manner as proof the site is legitimate. Rod Beckstrom said at the Black Hat Las Vegas convention, “This development is very historic, this is an upgrade that will matter to anyone who utilizes a computer system.” The agency with the name of the Domain Name System Extensions will add a code that is secret and identifies that code to a website address. Software solutions that are utilized on the Internet can be modified to perform a check on the identity of a website to be sure it is the site it asserts to be.

The chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force, Russ Housley, said, “It can be viewed as a packaging that is tamperproof involving the domain name. This is a very exciting development for the entire Internet community.” Ross also noted it will take some time for Internet organizations to use this to their advantage and apply it to local domains around the world. It will probably take a number of years. This action will prevent cyber criminals from performing attacks of code manipulation that redirects users from a true and legitimate site to a false one that is loaded with malware, or malicious code, that steals user IDs, passwords, and other sensitive information. The chief executive of VeriSign, Mark McLaughlin, said, “This a will give a very high level of protection without disrupting normal processes. It is not the complete answer, but it will pose a very good start.”

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