I started with Off to See the World, where I announced that we grow the community. And then I had the pleasure to tell you the we have a new Chief Security Advisor for EMEA – Monika Josi.

Now, my team is complete – at least on time zone level:

It is a pleasure for me to welcome Freddy Kasprzykowski in my team. He is with Microsoft today as our Product Manager for Infrastructure Products in Latin America. He is one of these strange people who are really addicted to security and I am looking forward to having him on the team End of October.

And then we have a “come back”: Eric Ashdown, who was the Chief Security Advisor for the Greater China Region a few year back is now coming back to Microsoft of the time zone lead for Asia (the good ones all keep coming back ). Even though we just agreed on the terms, he managed to get the papers in place (with the outstanding help or our HR in Singapore) and officially starts today… I guess he is sitting in a plane right now on his way to Singapore.

This team will really rock and it will be a great joy to work with them as well as with the rest of the Chief Security Advisors.

Roger

I often hear statements that the risk of losing your identity or being a victim of fraud is much higher online than offline. From my point of view it is more about the feelings of the consumer: In the real world, we know the risks – at least we learned them over the ages from our parents and we learned to live with them. For the average consumer, the Internet is probably 10-15 years all and there is no common sense yet. There is no “we learned to live with the risks” – yet.

We published a paper called Myth vs. Fact: Online and the Real World (this link point to the more secure version in XPS but if you want pdf, here you go ), which I think is worth looking at. If you want to leverage it, feel free.

Roger

It is always bad, if comics have a significant portion of truth:

and then

and finally

hmm…. too much truth for me to cope with

Roger

An year ago we launched Microsoft Security Essentials. I remember the day as I was looking at the Twitter stream to see the overall reactions and they were simply great! Further on, when I travelled, the main complaint I heard in some countries was: “Why do we not have it?” and it is a fair question.

Now, one year is gone and where do we stand? I moved personally quite some PCs from different Anti-Malware vendors to Microsoft Security Essentials and do not say any reason anymore to pay for a solution. Most solutions (being red or yellow or any color) consume a lot of processing power to do things the OS or the applications you use already do like firewalls, spam filtering etc. I have seen it too often that this simply slowed the PC down and the user then decided to switch part of their protection off… not really the goal of the exercise.

Typically I tell users to do three things when they run a Windows PC (and it is no different at all on any other platform):

1. Let the Windows firewall switched on
2. Use Automatic Updates for all Microsoft products (not “only” Windows) and install the updates – do not ignore the balloon! Do the same for any other software on your PC like Adobe Reader.
3. Use Microsoft Security Essentials

What more do you need?

Now to the learning: Our Microsoft Malware Protection Center published some statistics here: One Year of Microsoft Security Essentials.

So far we run on 31 million PCs! The interesting figure was the 27 million of those reported infections! So either they did not run anti-malware before or they did not renew their subscription beforehand. This is a real step forward to protect the ecosystem!

Look at the distribution outside the US:

Brazil did an outstanding job and so did Italy and especially the Netherlands if you compare the market size! I guess the other big ones like Germany, France, UK, China have room for improvement. Part of the problem here is that Microsoft Security Essentials needs a genuine copy of Windows as there is no real value in protecting something where malware came pre-installed and well-hidden in the stolen copy of the software.

Let’s work together to protect our users and let the install-base grow!

Roger

Sometimes I feel that people think the Internet is a room, where the laws of our society do not apply anymore… I read an article this morning on Swiss news called Drei Monate Haft für Beleidigungen auf Facebook – and here is an English version of it: Jail for French Facebook user.

Sometimes I wonder how naïve people are. In the community I live a politician was not re-elected because of the – let’s say very macho – statements he made on Facebook. Statements he might have made having a beer in a restaurant with his friends. Even there I think they would have been inappropriate but at the end of the day they stay within the walls of the restaurant (probably) and not within the “walls of Facebook”, where everybody can see them.

Does this impact “Freedom of Speech” – I do not think so. Freedom to me brings obligation as well and part of this means that you are free to say what you want as long as it does not e.g. illegally insult other people. There are laws on that in the real world and they apply in the digital world as well – and this is good

Roger