Last night Vinny Gullotto made some significant announcements at RSA Japan. At least for us they are significant:

1. We published the second Security Intelligence Report. Now, you might ask, we this is significant. Think about the data sources, we build the report on: Since FY05 the Malicious Software Removal Tool was run over 5 Billion times and removed more than 27 Million of Malware. Since November 2005 when we launched the Beta, Windows Live Online Safety Scanner was downloaded more than 15 Million times. Now, we collect information about the OS we are running on, the Service Packs and the Patch Level as well as the locale. We do not collect any Personal Identifiable Information - obviously. But this gives us a pretty broad bases to look at - and there are some really interesting figures in there. If you want to have a look at it here it is.
2. We will expand our Malware Protection Center. This means we will open a branch in Japan as well as Europe (Dublin). This means that we are increasing our capabilities to produces signature and react on threats significantly. Having said this, we are not running these centers with no-names. Vinny himself has a long background with McAfee and Symantec, Dan Wolff - running the team in Japan - joined us from McAfee, and last but definitely not least Katrin Totcheva - ramping up the team in Dublin - is joining us from F-Secure. I personally think that this team definitely will rock!
3. Last but not least, we are releasing a preview of our Malware Protection Portal, which will go live this summer. You can find it here: http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/ and feedback is definitely welcome

This is another step to show that we are serious about security. Over the years I am working in security at Microsoft, we did a lot of work to build more secure products and gain the trust of the customers. We made big steps since we started Trustworthy Computing and this is the next, serious step into the security product business.

Roger