http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/06/16/2241 ... 72&tid=201
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+meets+the ... tag=st.num
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The demo was part of an extraordinary two days in which outsiders were invited into the heart of the Windows empire for the express purpose of exploiting flaws in Microsoft computing systems. The event, which Microsoft has not publicized, was dubbed "Blue Hat"--a reference to the widely known "Black Hat" security conference, tweaked to reflect Microsoft's corporate color.
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Within minutes after their meeting was convened, however, the hall became hushed. Hackers had successfully lured a Windows laptop onto a malicious wireless network.
"It was just silent," said Stephen Toulouse, a program manager in Microsoft's security unit. "You couldn't hear anybody breathe."
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Matt Thomlinson, whose job it is to help make Microsoft engineers create more secure code, noticed that some of the engineers were turning red, becoming obviously angry at the demo hacking incident. Yet as painful as the lesson was, he was glad to see the crowd of engineers taking things personally.
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Noel Anderson, a wireless networking engineer on Microsoft's Windows team, became suspicious as soon as he walked into the hacking demo--and saw the giant wireless antenna at the front of the auditorium.
Anderson decided that he should leave his laptop turned off, an instinct that saved him the embarrassment of falling into the hackers' trap, even though the hackers focused on a demo laptop. But under different circumstances, he thought to himself, "I might have even fallen for that."
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Yet regardless of the mutual admiration, some tense moments were inevitable during the confrontation. Microsoft developers, for instance, were visibly uncomfortable when Moore demonstrated Metasploit--a tool that system administrators can use to test the reliability of their systems to intrusion. But Metasploit also includes a fair number of exploits, as well as tools that can be used to develop new types of attacks.
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