It's been quite a speech, the one delivered by Craig Mundie - Senior Vice President and CTO Advanced Strategies and Policy here at the RSA Conference in Paris.

Some of the things he said is what we've all been reading in the news for what it seems like ages now: "Hackers are smarter, computers are better, threat continues to evolve. Computer systems are becoming sophisticated. Products are less secure than they should be." I believe that everyone attending the RSA Conference knows that, or they shouldn't be involved with computer security in the first place.


What I've been waiting to hear is something "real" on what they are planning but all that was presented were statistics. The numbers displayed: 78% of large UK businesses suffered malicious security incidents, 95% of all US breaches are because of misconfiguration, etc. What I wanted to see is another chart, the one displaying how many of those compromised systems were actually running Microsoft software. That he didn't show.

The events of 9/11 were also mentioned and Mr. Mundie pointed out that this brought the concern of both the customers and Microsoft to a new level. What he was getting at is the concept of "Trustworthy Computing", a concept introduced by Bill Gates with a memo to Microsoft employees on January 15th. Mr. Mundie pointed out the following:

• Trustworthy Computing is more than security
• The goal is to earn the trust telephony and electricity enjoy
• Not an overnight accomplishment, nor ever finished

There's been more, but I don't really want to bore you with it, it's what we've heard before on many occasions.

The question of open source security has been raised, and some statistics were given - look at the slide below. Basically, the CTO was portraying open source software security as a myth. He said that if you have the opportunity to look at the code it doesn't mean that you actually do it. He forgot to say that the open source community is huge and if one person doesn't look at the code, someone else will, and that person will share a solution to a problem with others.