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Continuing to move forward – the Microsoft Malware Protection Center

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Fresh off our visit to Japan, where we discussed issues important to the Microsoft Malware Protection Center, we continue to move forward with our goal of being a premier anti-virus research and response center (R&R). Last week’s news of our new global response centers has been well received and that’s excellent! It’s important for our customers that we succeed at the set of goals we’ve declared and get ourselves into a leadership position not only to support the applications we are delivering, but to fine tune some of the processes we’ve created to better support our partners, the industry and the community at large who rely on MS and others to protect them from today’s threats.

When I arrived 8 months ago, MS had the makings of a team that was poised to break through to the next level of R&R. There were some key elements missing; I believe we have added those in the past 6 months and are prepared to see our goal realized. One of the key elements we added was opening the new centers in Dublin and Tokyo, and we have plans to add more centers soon. In addition, the new portal, which may be the most significant change, is now a home to display the day to day workings of the team, as well as be a place everyone can visit to see what we uncovered and track.

Check it out! www.microsoft.com/security/portal

On a more important note, our detection numbers are continuing upwards. I know this is a subject of ongoing interest for many, and we continue to push the team hard in this area because in the end it will be the most visible measure of our success.

We just once again had the OneCare product ICSA and West Coast Labs certified AND Forefront is now WestCoast Labs certified and is in the process of being ICSA certified as well. We feel very confident that we’ll achieve the VB100 Award, for both products as well when the results are published in June, by Virus Bulletin. This to me will exemplify the work we’ve been focusing on and continue to do so.

 And finally, we established some key areas and defined a set of benchmarks imperative for us to achieve world class response credibility. This, of course, is the essential element given today’s targeted attacks are more advanced than ever before.

We’ve applied the basic principles our partners, that come before us have to provide world class response to customer queries (including automated responses and queue processing to customer submissions and of course analysts globally to respond regionally) and we have the added element that is unique to MS, which is the insight into the more than 400 million Windows users worldwide.

These customers have consistently asked us to provide support to the ever growing threat of viruses, worms, Trojans and unwanted programs that plague their environments today.

I’d ask that you continue to check back as we provide updates straight from the labs as well as from those watching and monitoring our success. Just this past week we released a new volume of our Security Intelligence Report. The report outlines the trends that we have observed in the malicious software and potentially unwanted software landscapes over the last six months (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=88436&clcid=0x409).

We have a lot more in store and a lot more that we can be counted on to deliver.

Thanks,

Vinny Gullotto

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