Windows Red Team aims to keep your PC safe from threats

Wired wrote a piece about Microsoft's Windows Red Team. You may never have heard about this team but it consists of a bunch of hackers that strive to keep your PC safe from online threats. This Microsoft team is tasked with finding exploits in Windows.

David Weston, the principal security group manager for Windows, got his inspiration for the unit from whitehat hacker events like Pwn2Own. The idea behind Windows Red Team is to conduct Windows-focused hacking contests every day of the year, so the software giant no longer has to wait for a big attack to happen, or a vulnerability to be shared, before being able to fix Windows.

“Most of our hardening of the Windows operating system in previous generations was: Wait for a big attack to happen, or wait for someone to tell us about a new technique, and then spend some time trying to fix that,” Weston says. “Obviously that’s not ideal when the stakes are very high.”

Weston wanted to go beyond Microsoft’s historical mode of using bug bounties and community relationships to formulate a defense. He was tired of the reactive crouch, of responding to known issues rather than discovering new ones. He wanted to play some offense.

If you have some minutes to spare, you can read the full details over here. Interesting members of the Windows Red Team include Jordan Rabet, who jailbroke the Nintendo 3DS in 2014, Viktor Brange, who helped respond to the leak of the NSA hacking tool Eternal Blue, and a hacker with more than one zero-day exploit under his belt.