Security through Collaboration

If you ever heard me keynote an event you know that one of the key messages I have is, that partnerships are necessary in order to be able to protect against today's threats.

At Black Hat USA we just announced a new program called Microsoft Active Protections Program. The program is designed to give security vendors advance notification of our security bulletin release. This will help our partners to be able to protect our joint customers against the vulnerabilities we are fixing. The reason why we decided to launch this program is that exploits are developed much faster than they were in the past and security vendors have to act very fast – so let's give them some additional time and try to get ahead of the curve.

The key question will definitely be, who is eligible to join this program. The fact sheet gives you the answer:

• Members must offer commercial protection features to Microsoft customers against network- or host-based attacks.
• Members must provide protection features to a large number of customers.
• Members may not sell attack-oriented tools.
• Protection features provided by members must detect, deter or defer attacks.

Roger