A Call for Better Vulnerability Response
Microsoft forced a self-serving vulnerability disclosure policy on the industry 10 years ago, but cries foul when Google does the same today.Ten years ago, Microsoft dominated the cybersecurity industry. It employed, directly or through consultancies, the largest chunk of security experts. The ability to grant or withhold business meant influencing those consulting companies -- Microsoft didn't even have to explicitly ask for consulting companies to fire Microsoft critics for that to happen. Every product company depended upon Microsoft's goodwill in order to develop security products for Windows, engineering and marketing help that could be withheld on a whim.
This meant, among other things, that Microsoft dictated the "industry standard" of how security problems ("vulnerabilities") were reported. Cybersecurity researchers who found such bugs were expected to tell the vendor in secret, and give the vendor as much time as they needed in order to fix the bug. Microsoft sometimes sat on bugs for years before fixing them, relying upon their ability to blacklist researchers to keep them quiet. Security researchers who didn't toe the line found bad things happening to them.
I experienced this personally. We found a bug in a product called TippingPoint that allowed us to decrypt their Continue reading
