Michael Sutton Quotations

We applaud Compass Group North America for its leadership. Its commitment, and a similar decision by major food retailer Wal-Mart, is a significant step toward transformation of the seafood market in ways that support sustainable fisheries and healthy ocean ecosystems.

The only model that makes no sense to me is the altruistic model. The vendor wants the researcher to do his code review for free and that doesn't quite fly. They are profiting from the vulnerability information but they don't want to pay for it.

Many of our most valuable contributors consistently identify significant vulnerabilities that may never make the front page, but both avert major exploitation and secure considerable compensation through our rewards program.

Ocean Champions has the potential to be one of the most transformative things we've ever done in the whole conservation movement.

I would certainly recommend that users implement the vendor workarounds until a patch is made available. We feel that exploit code can and will be created.

He wasn't even drinking or anything. Never drank before.

Patching is very urgent. We expect public exploit code to become available, especially for the MSDTC issue.

Patching is very urgent, ... We expect public exploit code to become available, especially for the MSDTC issue.

We're not aware of any public exploit code for it at this time.

We pay people directly for their submissions, and then we also have various programs to reward our loyal contributors and keep them working with us. This is our latest effort to further reward them.

Even though Windows Media Player is not something generally used to render images, it has the capability of doing that. It's not difficult to create a Web page that uses Windows Media Player to display an image instead of the default application. I think it's a ripe target for exploitation if we see public exploit code for it.

There's always code reuse in development, which is a good thing. No one writes an entire application from scratch. But if you're using someone else's code, you're relying on the security of that code. Developers need to apply the same level of security testing to those shared pieces as they do to their own code.

A DLL is canned functionality, so if you include a vulnerable DLL in an application, that application is by default vulnerable.

This is relatively easy to exploit. It takes some degree of social engineering -- the attacker would have to draw people to a malicious Web site -- but after that, there's no further intervention required. An attacker could leverage this to write to a file on the hard drive. And once you can write to a person's machine, you have full control.

It seems like there is some flaky code in portions of the libraries that handle the WMF files. It wouldn't surprise me if we see more vulnerabilities emerge, which I am sure will be followed by more media coverage.

It was definitely a surprise to see Cisco's reaction. I don't think that's the best approach. I do feel that it is happening less and that vendors are realizing that we don't want to work against them, but with them.

The attraction is that we are not bogged down in tremendous bureaucracies and processes that make it difficult to get the transactions done.

The vulnerability still exists in Internet Explorer in that it's very lenient in how it pulls CSS, but right now nobody is publishing a way that it can be leveraged to do something useful. That's not to say that somebody won't find a way. I'm sure somebody will come up with a creative way to leverage it to do something evil.

In 2005, we were credited with reporting 3 'critical' vulnerabilities to Microsoft, and we want to encourage our contributors to keep looking in that direction.