Two-step verification makes it more difficult for hackers to access your account, even when they have your password. If you turn on two-step verification, you’ll see an extra page every time you sign in on a device that isn’t trusted. The extra page prompts you to enter a security code to sign in.
Your Microsoft account (formerly your Windows Live ID) is the combination of an email address and a password that you use to sign in to services such as Xbox LIVE and Outlook.com, as well as devices such as Windows Phone and computers running Windows 8.
Knowing when to trust a website depends in part on who publishes it, what information they want, and what you want from the site. Here are five reasons to think twice before sharing information with a website. 1.      The site asks for personal information on a page whose URL does not start with HTTPS.
Rogue security software (also known as “scareware”) creates pop-up warnings that look like legitimate security updates. It provides limited or no security and generates erroneous or misleading alerts.
To get updates for Windows and other Microsoft programs at the same time, including updates for Microsoft Office (Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, and more), go to the Microsoft Update website.
It pays to keep your email address as private as possible, but sometimes it seems like there’s nothing you can do to keep it out of the hands of spammers.
Adam Shostack here. One of the really exciting things about being in the Microsoft Security Engineering Center is all of the amazing collaborators we have around the company. People are always working to make security engineering easier and more effective. When we talk about security testing, we often focus on what it can’t do.
You may have read recently about a large number of Web servers that were compromised through a SQL injection attack. The malicious SQL payload is very well designed, somewhat database schema agnostic and generic  so it could compromise as many database servers as possible.
Adam Shostack here. Blogger Ian Grigg has an interesting response to my threat modeling blog series, and I wanted to respond to it.
Once again, my effort to explore common misperceptions (more recently exploring unpatched statistics) has brought out some of the common objections from those that don’t necessarily like the results.
