Marc Maiffret got into
hacking not long after he got his first
computer as a schoolboy, and by age 17, he was a known hacker who was greeted one morning by an FBI agent who held a gun to his face.
Since then, Maiffret turned his life around and helped to co-found eEye Digital Security, a company dedicated to finding
security flaws in Microsoft's
software. Last December, he joined anti-malware firm FireEye as chief security architect.
For all his work trying to find holes in Microsoft's products, Maiffret now says that the Windows maker has the
best practices when it comes to software security.
"Now when you look at Microsoft today they do more to secure their software than anyone. They're the model for how to do it. They're not perfect; there's room for improvement. But they are definitely doing more than anybody else in the industry, I would say," Maiffret told CNet in an interview. "From an internal process in how they go about auditing their code and securing software from a technical perspective, they do have one of the best models. The area they still have room for improvement is around time lines of how long it takes for them to fix things."
Maiffret is now pointing to Adobe and Apple as being companies who are lacking in the security department. "They are starting to get black eyes with people saying Adobe is a bigger worry than Microsoft is at the moment, which I agree with. As those things are happening, Adobe and Apple and other companies are starting to pay attention and care more. But a year ago, it was still very much a marketing thing. People from both companies treated it as a marketing problem. They didn't have good technical structures behind the scenes."
