10 years ago, Microsoft"s Chairman Bill Gates sent out a memo to all of the company"s employees. In his email, Gates said that he wanted to launch a new initiative at Microsoft called Trustworthy Computing. He stated, "What I mean by this is that customers will always be able to rely on these systems to be available and to secure their information. Trustworthy Computing is computing that is as available, reliable and secure as electricity, water services and telephony."
10 years later, Microsoft is now celebrating that Trustworthy Computing effort with a new press release and a new infographic that goes over Microsoft"s efforts at making its software more secure in the past decade. The company pats itself on the back a bit for its improvements. For example, it says, "Better instrumentation such as Windows Error Reporting has led to fewer system crashes, increasing productivity and alleviating user frustration. In the area of privacy, Microsoft was one of the first companies to publish privacy standards for developers and to provide consumers with layered privacy notices."
But has all of these efforts made Microsoft"s software products more secure? News.com chatted with some security experts on that subject and the answer seems to be, "Yes." One of them is Marc Maiffret, the founder and chief technology officer at eEye Inc. He discovered the worm Code Red in 2001, which was the first worm program made to infect a Microsoft platform. The worm managed to infect hundreds of thousands of web sites, including the White House web server. Now Maiffret praises Microsoft"s security efforts, saying. "They went from being one of the worst companies in security to being one of the best."
You can also read our coverage of Microsoft"s vision here, all the way from 2002 and the leaked memo story from January 2002.