Stepto leaves MS security, goes gaming

Toulouse (left) , who served as the public face of Redmond's security response during some of the biggest hacker attacks, is exiting Redmond's Building 27 to join the Windows Live Services Group.

A passionate gamer, Toulouse says he will join the Xbox LIVE team to "work on developing strategy and features" so that people continue to have enjoyable and safe experiences.

This will be an exciting new challenge as this role is purely policy and developer program management, it has nothing to do with communications or security! (they have plenty of talented people off doing that stuff, so this will be a nice break from doing network/software security).

For many of us who cover computer security and hacker attacks, Toulose was the go-to guy for Microsoft's response. He helped guide the media (and big customers) through the company's response to the Slammer and Zotob worm attacks and is widely regarded as a stand-up guy who was comfortable with admitting the company's weaknesses and explaining why certain controversial decisions were being made.

[ SEE: Responsible disclosure, the Microsoft way ]

During his time at the MSRC (Microsoft Security Response Center), he often spoke at conferences on the internal workings of the company's patch creation and deployment process, befriended hackers to preach the gospel of 'responsible disclosure' and even dared to scold/lecture Apple on glaring weaknesses in its security patching and response mechanisms.

More recently, he had moved up the ladder to handle evangelization of the security enhancements built into Windows Vista.