Hacker News Reader

Comment by Artemis2 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's Security Response Center (MSRC as mentioned in the article) is terrible. I've reported a security issue in Outlook.com and Outlook for Office 365 in July, and every month I get an email from the case manager telling me that "the team is still working on this". Mind you, I reported a similar bug three years ago and it got fixed in "only" two weeks. In both cases it's a trivial fix with mitigations already in place. I'm not even mentioning how hard it is to talk to someone about a bounty.

I'm considering migrating away from Microsoft products because of this; they offer bounties for important bugs but the way they handle reports is horrible.

View on HN

I worked with MSRC several times over the years and found them to be smart security professionals (and often former hackers) who care deeply about improving security.

I suggest you take the long view and compare how Microsoft handled security disclosures in the past ("That vulnerability is entirely theoretical.") compared with today (inviting hackers to their oncampus Bluehat conference, sponsoring CanSecWest, etc). Things could always get better, but they've come a long way.

More specifically, "only" 2 weeks to issue a security fix is actually pretty good for thick client/desktop software. It's less than ideal for something like a web app where they control all the machines that need to adopt the fix, but still. Also, the severity of reported issue is a factor in when something gets fixed.

Consider looking at something like rfp's RFPolicy if you'd like guidance on how to disclose in a reasonable, timely way

I completely agree with you, in general they have come a long way (bounties, culture, recognition...). They're just not there yet (by there in mean Facebook-grade responsiveness).

I was only voicing my personal experience, which has been very poor (maybe the team, or the seriousness of the bugs), but in general I have heard some good things, especially for truly critical issues.

>Facebook-grade responsiveness

When did Facebook become the pinnacle of security response? The last thing I read about them was pretty horrible. Much worse than the Microsoft response here.

http://exfiltrated.com/research-Instagram-RCE.php

I remember this story, and people familiar with the industry (tptackek and friends) explained the situation quite well why Facebook did the correct thing, although not fair for unfamiliar with the industry readers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10754194

"only" 2 weeks to issue a security fix is actually pretty good for thick client/desktop software.

That's actually even more of a reason to migrate away from Microsoft.

I think you misread his comment — the issue was reported _years_ ago and then fixed just two weeks back.

You misread it! I reported one a long time ago, which was fixed in two weeks (so relatively quickly). Another, very similar, reported nearly a year ago, still isn't fixed.

Microsoft is huge, and the teams behave differently. I have reported two different problems I had with Visual Studio 2015, using the included feedback mechanism, and received back email responses in a couple of hours. In both cases I was able to solve the problem I had and they actually followed up a couple of days later to make sure the problem was definitely fixed.

True, none of those were security issues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com