Microsoft declines to use own security product

Sam Costello, IDG News Service   Today’s Top Stories   or  Other Security Stories  

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July 12, 2002 (IDG News Service) -- NetScreen Technologies Inc., a company that makes firewall and virtual private network hardware and software, announced this week that it has gained a major customer: Microsoft Corp.
Microsoft's SQL Labs, the part of the company that works on Microsoft's SQL Server, is using NetScreen's 500 series security appliance to defend its network against Code Red, Nimda and other worm attacks, according to NetScreen. That decision comes despite the fact that Microsoft already sells its own security product, touted as a defense against worms.
The Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server was introduced in early 2001. The company proclaimed it as its first product aimed entirely at the security market (see story). ISA Server offers such features as an "enterprise-class" firewall and a Web cache.
The selection of a third-party product to protect a Microsoft network is especially ironic because of the content on a Web page posted to Microsoft's ISA Server site in mid-June that lists the top 10 reasons that businesses ought to switch to ISA Server. The No. 1 reason, according to the list, is that "ISA Server is an ... enterprise firewall and secure application gateway designed to protect the enterprise network from hacker intrusion and malicious worms."
Be that as it may, the NetScreen-500 allowed Microsoft's SQL Labs to "quickly ... eradicate the (Nimda) viruses from our labs and identify infected machines outside the lab so we could notify them and effectively stop the spread," Mark Jackson, SQL network engineer at Microsoft's SQL Labs, said in the NetScreen press release.
Microsoft declined to comment further.

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