Posted by Tim Cranton Associate General Counsel, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit Today the FBI announced federal indictments returned against three culprits charged with disseminating a major malware scheme believed to have caused $100 million in losses to victims worldwide. The scheme revolved around a form of malware called “scareware,” which falsely persuades consumers that they need to purchase useless and expensive software to protect their computers. Microsoft is proud to have supported the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice in these cases, which send a clear and important message to cyber-criminals that they will be caught and brought to justice. The scheme in these indictments was global, complex and sophisticated. The scareware went by various names, including WinFixer – meant to mislead consumers into associating the bogus software with trusted Microsoft products. At one time, WinFixer and its variants are thought to have been responsible for 75 percent of scareware worldwide.
Posted by Pamela Passman Corporate Vice President, Global Corporate Affairs
With the addition of Louisiana and Ohio today, 32 states and the District of Columbia have now joined Elevate America, an initiative we launched 15 months ago to provide people across the United States with access to no-cost technology training and certification that helps them find employment. So far, we’ve offered more than 800,000 free training and certification vouchers through our partnerships with Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
We’ve learned a lot from working with these states. They’re each facing complex economic challenges, but it’s very encouraging to see how hard they’re working to reduce unemployment. Elevate America is designed to help by strengthening workforce skills, specifically the computer skills that half of today’s jobs require, and that will be required by an estimated 77 percent of new jobs created in the next decade. Of course, computer skills are just one set of skills that people need to find employment, yet we’re already seeing firsthand how important access to these skills can be.
Posted by William KennedyCorporate Vice President, Office Communications and Forms
Many customers today organize their private and professional lives in e-mail, where they routinely store essential data. Microsoft Outlook and similar programs have long since replaced the rolodex or the pocket diary as people’s primary repositories for contacts, photos, calendar items and more. As the tools we use change, so do the reasons we use them. If you’ve ever searched through old e-mail for a friend’s phone number, or if you work within an organization concerned about regulatory and compliance issues, you likely understand why having easy access to the data stored in e-mail files is important.
Given the importance of Outlook and our other high-volume products to computer users we’ve taken great strides to advance their openness and transparency, in keeping with our Interoperability Principles. Today, we have met another milestone on the path toward greater interoperability.
This spring, we released detailed technical documentation for a file format (.pst) used in recent versions of, Microsoft Outlook, our most popular e-mail application. By releasing the technical documentation and protocols for communicating with Outlook data, we are making it easier to enhance corporate compliance, e-Discovery, security, search, and enterprise content management. These types of applications can interoperate with the .pst data, even if they run on other platforms – including those of our competitors. The documentation we have released provides a new way of accessing this data, regardless of whether Outlook is installed.
On Thursday we hosted our first citizenship “Accelerator Summit,” a day of open discussion on our corporate citizenship efforts. The conversation was based on how technology and partnerships can accelerate change on social and economic issues. The event included a variety of different sessions related to workforce development, education, environment, online safety, and the role of technology in the non-profit community. It was attended by government and nongovernmental partners, academics, journalists and bloggers.
Events like this provide us with the opportunity to shine a light on the big problems we are working with others to try to solve. We have learned that partnership must be at the very center of our efforts. We don’t have all the answers and we are always learning. We learn from the feedback we receive, we learn from working with partners and we learn from how people are using our products and services – often in ways we never imagined.
When we formalized our citizenship program in 2003, we realized there were efforts underway across every part of the company. It became apparent that we had a great opportunity to increase the impact of those activities by bringing them together.
Posted by John Vassallo Vice President EU Legal and Corporate Affairs
(Cross posted from microsoft.eu)
Microsoft welcomes the “Digital Agenda for Europe,” announced earlier this week by European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes, as a bold roadmap for action. We share the Commission’s view that technology is an enabler for economic growth, job creation, sustainability and social inclusion. As a company, we are fully committed to working with the European Commission and governments to realize the potential of Europe's digital future.
The Digital Agenda sets out concrete actions in a number of important areas, such as harmonizing the delivery of pan-EU digital services, driving connectivity and broadband penetration, as well as promoting interoperability across the range of the ICT agenda. These actions can act as a spur for Europe’s competitiveness and for the broader innovation and economic growth agenda. The Digital Agenda also addresses online security, data privacy and identity management so that Europe’s Internet users have greater trust and confidence online. We commend this action and the preparation for measures that address jurisdiction in cyberspace at European and International level. These steps are essential to pave the way for the roll-out of next generation technologies, like cloud computing, that will benefit citizens and business across Europe.