Microsoft Security Team Expansion

Wooing Vincent Gullotto away from McAfee's AVERT team has begun showing positive results. As reported at Computerworld, Mr. Gulloto discussed Microsoft plans to open new security research centres in Europe and Asia at RSA last week.

The plan is to use the centres to provide 24-hour monitoring of emerging security threats. Such monitoring will also provide faster access to threats for Windows Live OneCare. The European head of operations will be Katrin Tocheva, formerly a malware researcher at F-Secure.

Referring to the failure of OneCare to pass the VirusBulletin VB100 test, Mr. Gullotto was quoted as explaining:

"We missed one virus in their collection. While missing one virus isn't huge, it is not a good thing either. It can put the thinking into the mind of folks that we can't keep them protected."

Let's face facts -- whether an anti-malware, anti-trojan or anti-virus software, all vendors have an occasional false/positive and no software will have every variant of every virus, trojan, or other nasty-ware in detection. Microsoft's new security research centres will certainly go a long way toward placing OneCare in excellent position to at least have all major variants in detection.