The Security Mentor

Have you ever wondered how anti-virus companies get hold of viruses so they can write software to detect them?

That question has led to a lot of defamatory conspiracy theories.

Microsoft is trolling the bad neighborhoods of the Internet to detect new kinds of attacks against Windows machines. They've set a small army of closely monitored XP systems to crawl automatically through questionable web sites. As soon as one machine gets infected they can take it offline and check whether it's a known attack or a new one. If it's a new one they can get to work on fixing the underlying bug.

I can think of at least two ways for the bad guys to avoid getting caught by this but it's still a good idea and Yi-Ming Wang, the researcher who headed the project, deserves a compliment.