02.23.10
Microsoft Moles Galore
Summary: Former Microsoft employees (or existing ones) who have a lot of influence are being tracked for their impact on other companies or establishments to be understood
IN the previous post we showed how Microsoft entryism at Amazon led to severe consequences (Microsoft also hijacked Yahoo! through personnel). This post accumulates new examples from the past couple of weeks — examples where prominent Microsoft employees are entering companies/entities other than Microsoft.
Here is a U.S. Forensic Technology Solutions Practice getting ‘poisoned’ by Microsoft staff:
Edward Gibson, Former Chief Cyber Security Advisor for Microsoft LTD in the U.K., Joins PricewaterhouseCoopers’ U.S. Forensic Technology Solutions Practice
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) announced today that Edward Gibson, the former Chief Security Advisor for Microsoft LTD in the United Kingdom, has joined the firm as a director in PwC’s U.S. Forensics Technology Solutions practice. Mr. Gibson will focus on helping organizations with issues involving investigating economic espionage, complex money laundering, cyber fraud schemes and intellectual property theft. He will be based in PwC’s McLean, VA (Tysons Corner) office and will service a wide range of clients in matters of security breach investigation and overall risk management strategies.
While serving as Microsoft’s Chief Cyber Security Advisor in the U.K., Mr. Gibson was the chief spokesperson and point of contact for Microsoft Ltd U.K. on all matters of cyber security and IT infrastructure risk management for global businesses based in the U.K., government, law enforcement and security services, press and consumers.
Another new example:
Singapore based Georgie Farmer, Asia Travel Manager, Microsoft, was unanimously appointed to a second term as Regional Chair, ACTE Asia-Pacific by the Association of Corporate Travel Executive’s (ACTE) Board of Directors during a 20 January meeting.
Juniper has absorbed several Microsoft executives, including the current CEO [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. The company recently settled fraud allegations using $169,000,000 and there is the following news: “Juniper Networks Protects Customers from New Microsoft Vulnerabilities”
Microsoft’s new guardians, eh?
The Boston press writes about Microsoft’s former AstroTurfer Don Dodge [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and other news sites write about the extension of this Microsoft community of boosters/employees whom Microsoft is trying to keep under control:
Microsoft is telling some of its biggest fans to stay off Twitter for the next few days.
That’s because right now Microsoft is holding its annual MVP Summit — a gathering of over 1,000 people who are, according to Microsoft, “committed to helping others get the most out of their experience with Microsoft products and technologies.”
Lastly, former Microsoft employee Howard Schmidt, who is now the US cybersecurity czar [1, 2], is commenting about his former employer in this new interview: [via]
That’s why you see a lot of the activity going on, Microsoft with their End to End Trust program, Oracle, with some of the security programs they’ve got. You see a lot of private industry critical infrastructure owners and operators saying, “Well, we get the message. We understand that we’ve got to do things differently. We’re gonna put a higher priority on security.”
Schmidt worked at Microsoft, so he ought to know that their software is not secure. Brian Valentine, who was a top Windows executive before becoming a top Amazon executive (SVP), said that Microsoft’s products “just aren’t engineered for security.”
Earlier today we explained why Microsoft's failure at security may have cost trillions of dollars. It’s because approximately one in two machines is a zombie PC if it runs Windows and the effect it has on online banking gets explained in the following new post:
Man in the Browser a.k.a MITB is a new breed of attacks whose primary objective is to spy on browser sessions (mostly banking) and in that process intercept and modify the web page contents transparently in the background. In a classic MITB attack, It’s a very likely that what the user is seeing on his/her browser window is not something which the actual server sent. Similarly, what server sees on the other end might not be what user was intending to send. Why MITB? How different is it from conventional browser hijacking? I’ll explain that shortly.
This has a direct effect on the banks. Will the banks mind? Well, sadly enough, they too are connected to Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], sometimes owing to Microsoft staff like Susan Hauser who lies on behalf of large banks in order to promote racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. █
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