Stephen Toulouse, Microsoft's security program manager:
Meanwhile, Firefox and Opera look awfully appealing.
Security is really an industry-wide problem. Just this morning I had to install an update to Firefox to block a flaw that would've allowed an attacker to run a program on my system. We're working around the clock to make Internet Explorer safer, and we're making changes with our Windows XP Service Pack 2 to make browsing a lot more secure.
... There's always that trade-off between functionality and security, and we've taken some steps recently that bear that out. For instance, the address bar of Explorer was allowing a certain type of rendering. People had grown to use that functionality; they liked it. And then we started to see attackers co-opt it to try to get software onto the machine, and we reviewed that feature and made the decision to stop the product from being able to do this.
...Software written by humans will always contain errors. We're fundamentally changing the way things operate, to help to make software more resistant to attacks. We're two and a half years down a much longer road; it's more of a 10-year timeline.
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© 2010 Michael Thompson
