MS Security Guru Leaves for Amazon.com

Rocky Mann writes "Jesper Johansson, a security guru for Microsoft, is leaving the company to join Amazon.com. Johansson served for some five years as a 'senior security strategist', and is considered one of the world's leading experts on how to protect installations of Windows." From the article: "Johansson is also an advocate for the use of safe-passwords techniques in the enterprise. At the height of the WMF zero-day attacks earlier in 2006, Johansson offered measured advice on the use of unofficial patches and he was constantly on the move, traveling around the world to help customers figure out how to use Microsoft's products securely."

I met this guy

[DnemoniX]

I attended a small security lecture with about 25 people, he was the presenter. He walked through some real time hacks against Microsoft products that he had running in VPC. Nothig to stunning for me, but most of the people there had no clue about security so they were all blown away. I didn't see anything special. One thing of note that amused me, was the bumper sticker on his laptop that read "My other box is your Linux box". I said that I couldn't fit "My other box is a 10,000 node zombie cluster of Windows machines" on a bumper sticker....he chuckled...

If you run his name on Amazon you will find his book, which is really very good if you are a Windows Server Admin and are new to the security game.

One Liners

[Anonymous Coward]

Just moving from one marketing gig to another.

He was done securing vista and there just wasn't anything challenging left at Microsoft for him to work on.

He's moving to Amazon to implement Trustworthy One-Clicking(TM).

His real reason for leaving: he's looking for the one, the only one that's build like an Amazon...and he doesn't want people to buy their books from a brick house.

Hey, does Amazon sell office chairs?

maybe this is just me

[Anonymous Coward]

but it seems that while rotecting Amazon's internal network, along with the protocol to customers (which presumably uses SSL), is admittedly a huge task, one can rely heavily on firewalls, server configurations, protocols, and physical security policies that can be standardized throughout the company.

While the ongoing task of securing hundreds of millions of desktops and servers owned and operated at customer sites is orders of magnitude more formidable. Maybe he didn't want to be around when the Vista hit the fan?

Breaking News

[quokkapox]

Any tech guru leaving Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, YouTube, or any other innovative company, to go work for Microsoft, *would* be breaking news. Hate to say it, but it ain't happenin'. Somebody, prove me wrong.

BLOG: Im finally switching to Linux .......

[Anonymous Coward]

AMAZON is 94% UNIX/LINUX shop