Friends, After 10 years of working for the greatest software company in the world, I will be leaving Microsoft. I strongly believe that God directs our paths and His plan for me has been confirmed by the amazing opportunities He has provided for my family here in Texas. My wife and I moved around a lot...

Frantic in Dallas I’m back…after a long absence. The last 3 months or so have been crazy in my life. After my trip to London and Edinburgh in mid-September, I returned home patiently awaiting the delivery of our son in late-October. We went to the doctor on Monday, September 29th and the sonogram looked...

This wraps up the 4-part series where I discuss physical security at Microsoft with one of the guys who keeps you safe when you visit Redmond or any other of the many Microsoft campuses around the world. Thanks Johnny for making us all feel safe when we step onto the campus and thanks for sharing your...

UPDATE : I got your emails about there being a problem with this Silverlight video (thanks Doug!), so I re-rendered and have re-posted the video. Nothing stinks worse than having the movie go out in mid-series! OH YES! I actually had the privilege yesterday of getting an hour long Capabilities Tour of...

More of my sitdown with Johnny Walker who helps run our Microsoft Global Security Operations Center. When we talk about physical security, as IT Pros, we’re typically talking about securing the datacenters and the boxes themselves. Johnny also has to consider things like Loss Prevention, Executive Protection...

In Episode 3 of the popular Security Show, we sit down with Johnny Walker who is a Group Program Manager with Microsoft Global Security Operations Center (GSOC). We’ve done a podcast on TechNet Radio with Johnny in the past, but this time we get into a little more detail as he explains the methods by...

This is the last of Episode Two and I hope everyone has been enjoying this interesting session with the FBI. In this final session, we wrapup and get a few comments from the audience. Good stuff.   Next time, I’ll be posting Episode 3 titled “Gate, Guards, and Guns” where we’ll spend some time talking...

I hope this is waking some folks up with regards to the huge issue that insider threat poses within your own company. We discuss some of the common characteristics that these people show and how we identify them. What are some of the triggers that make these folks turn against you? What are the warning...

Last week I had the honor of attending the 20th Annual Crimes Against Children conference, hosted by the Dallas Children's Advocacy Center and the Dallas Police Department . It is billed as “ Providing Professionals the Instruction, Information and Strategies They Need to Protect Child Victims and Prosecute...

Good stuff! Last and final part!

Here’s Part II of Kevin’s excellent session on Threat Modeling: Death Star Threat Modeling (Part II)

Okay….what the heck is going on???!!! I apparently wasn’t paying enough attention to this whole thing. It was my understanding that Brett Favre asked for reinstatement, the Packers offered him options to tryout, he refused and then he wanted his release. I was angry at Favre thinking he didn’t want to...

I had the distinct honor this week, of attending the Bureau’s 100th Anniversary celebration event here at the Dallas FBI Field Office . (I’m the one that’s not blurry in the picture on the left) The event itself was very well done and the speeches by both Special Agent in Charge Casey and by Sen. Kay...

Sorry for the long delay, but I’ve been on vacation and my wife is pretty adamant about me not checking email, posting blog entries, etc. I don’t think I need a break, but apparently I was wrong, so I took about 8 days of vacation. Of course, there are about a bunch of things I wanted to blog about in...

There is a term that I hear quite often from my contacts in the law enforcement community, when it comes to cybercrime: “ Follow the money .” Well, apparently that term is also being used by the bad guys, and in this case it’s “ Follow the gold pieces .” All Your Epic Gear Is Belong to Us Okay….it’s...

This week marks the last week of work in the IT field for visionary and founder, Bill Gates. I’m sure many of you are reading stories all over the Internet about Bill, I thought I’d share a story about Bill as well. I joined Microsoft because I was a huge fan of their products, even back to when I was...

When I'm sitting on a plane and they tell me to "turn off anything with an on/off power button"...it hurts. So then I pull out a book and read. As much as I fly, I read a lot. Often I'm catching up on one the many, many trade magazines to which I subscribe ( CSO Magazine , Security Management...

Well, I know it's been awhile....but I'm back. Several of you were kind enough to send me gentle reminders that I have been neglecting my blog, and were worried that I may indeed have dropped off the face of the Earth. Not so. Where Have You Been, Kai? In a nutshell......traveling like you would never...

The short answer is YES! However, I'm not going to be confined to a single breakout room like I was last year. (ESPNism: " You cannot stop him, you can only hope to contain him .") If you remember, we had such a huge amount of folks wanting to get into the session I did with the FBI that we had to turn...

Well, I'm sorry for the delay in posting, but I didn't get home until after 10:30PM on Friday night, but American Airlines did get me home and given the issues with the MD-80s recently, I'm just happy to have made it. Even got bumped to First Class which is always nice. I had the chance to attend only...

Who Doesn't Like Breakfast? Sort of a slow day here at RSA today. My guess is that all those parties sort of took their toll on the majority of the attendees. I got up early to catch up on some schoolwork (yes....the quest for the elusive MBA continues, even when I'm traveling.....) and then headed down...

Day 2. I'm a but wore out since I was up into the wee hours trying to get my new video blogging mess figured out. The process that I thought would be (encoding and uploading).....wasn't. But the part that I thought would be easy (quality of the HD stream).....was. Still trying to work out exactly why...

New Direction I got up nice and early and managed to drag myself over to the convention, to be sure I wouldn't miss Craig Mundie's keynote where he announced the new End-to-End Trust vision we've been hearing about internally for a few weeks. Craig delivered the keynote in a "fireside chat" format with...

You've been sitting around asking yourself, " Okay okay...I heard Bill Gates announce the whole 'trustworthy computing' concept back in 2002... What's next Microsoft? How do we solve the future security problems as an industry?" As you know, the Internet has transformed the way many of us live today...

I'm not Michael Howard . My software development background consisted of struggling through my two C++ classes in my undergraduate MIS program. Sure, I managed to convince my professors that I knew what a virtual function was and how it all worked, but I never really felt the "Call of the Code" like...