The greatest security story never told – how Microsoft's SDL saved Windows

Microsoft has launched a new website to “tell the untold story” of something it believes changed the history of Windows security and indeed Microsoft itself – the Software Development Lifecycle or plain ‘SDL’ for short.

For those who have never heard of the SDL, or don't have the remotest idea why it might be important, the new site offers some refreshingly candid insights to change their minds.

Without buying into the hype, the SDL can still fairly be described as the single initiative that saved Redmond's bacon at a moment of huge uncertainty in 2002 and 2003. Featuring video interviews with some of its instigators and protagonists, the new site offers outsiders a summary of how and why Microsoft decided to stop being a software firm and become a software and security firm in order to battle the malware that was suddenly smashing into its software.#

Few outside the firm knew of the crisis unfolding inside its campus but not everyone was surprised. Microsoft now traces the moment the penny dropped to the early hours of a summer morning in 2001, only weeks before it was due to launch Windows XP to OEMs.

“It was 2 a.m. on Saturday, July 13, 2001, when Microsoft’s then head of security response, Steve Lipner, awoke to a call from cybersecurity specialist Russ Cooper. Lipner was told a nasty piece of malware called “Code Red” was spreading at an astonishing rate. Code Red was a worm — a malicious computer program that spreads quickly by copying itself to other computers across the Internet. And it was vicious.”

Others arrived in the following two years; the Blaster worm, Nimda, Code Red II, MyDoom, Sasser, and on and on. To a world and a Microsoft not used to the notion of malware being a regular occurrence, this was all a big shock.

By January 2002, with attacks on its baby XP humbling the biggest software firm on earth, Bill Gates sent his famous Trustworthy Computing (TwC) memo to everyone at Microsoft. From now on, security was going to be at the root of everything and so help us God.
 
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