This article in our series on Microsoft’s free security tools is focused on a tool called the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA). Many years ago before Windows Update was available, servicing software was much more painful than it is today.
In July, we kicked off a blog series focused on “Microsoft’s Free Security Tools.” The series highlights free security tools that Microsoft provides to help make IT professionals’ and developers’ lives easier. A good tool can save a lot of work and time for those people responsible for developing and managing software.
This article in our series focused on Microsoft’s free security tools is on a tool called Portqry. This tool is a TCP/IP connectivity test tool, port scanner, and local port monitor. Portqry is useful for troubleshooting networking issues as well as verifying network security related configurations.
This article in our series focused on Microsoft’s free security tools is on a tool called Windows Defender Offline. Windows Defender Offline is a standalone software application that is designed to help detect malicious and other potentially unwanted software, including rootkits that try to install themselves on a PC.
As the adoption of cloud computing continues to rise, and customers demand 24/7 access to their services and data, reliability remains a challenge for cloud service providers everywhere. As I said in the recent Cloud Fundamentals video on reliability, it’s not a matter of if an outage will occur; it’s strictly a matter of when.
This article in our series focused on Microsoft’s free security tools is on the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) banned.h header file. This is an important tool for developers who are trying to minimize the number of security vulnerabilities that exist in the C or C++ code they write.
Tim Burrell and Thomas Garnier of the TwC Security Science team present the sixth and last blog installment describing more /sdl functionality in Visual Studio 2012 RC. Please note that there will be an MSDN webcast discussing the security enhancements to Visual Studio 2012 RC – a wrap-up of sorts – on June 13 at 9:00AM (PST).
Pop security quiz: What’s the most secure way to store a secret? a)     Encrypt it with a strong symmetric cryptographic algorithm such as AES, using a 256-bit key. b)     Encrypt it with a strong asymmetric cryptographic algorithm such as RSA, using a 4096-bit key.
Hi everyone, Shawn Hernan here. Being a security guy is incredibly rewarding because you get to look at virtually any part of a product, from kernel drivers to web services to user education to sales and servicing.
Adam Shostack here. I said recently that I wanted to talk more about what I do. The core of what I do is help Microsoft’s product teams analyze the security of their designs by threat modeling.
