Joining Microsoft Telemetry community with Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) Beta 3

Facing cybercrime, threatened by multiple network threats with never sufficient mitigations, how many times did you wonder: “I wish that there was something extra I can do”?

One thing you can do is to join the Microsoft Telemetry Service. By joining the Microsoft Telemetry Service you will have direct impact on the quality of our protection technologies and will assist us to better protect both your organization and the community.

Forefront TMG Telemetry Reporting supports both Malware Protection and Network Inspection System, (NIS) detection reporting. When Malware Protection or NIS identifies potential malware or an attack it reports to Microsoft information about the potential attack identified. This information is stored by Microsoft and analyzed to help identify attack patterns and improve precision and efficiency of threat mitigations. Microsoft uses this analyzed information to report on top potential threats in the global network and in The Microsoft Security Intelligence Report (SIR), providing an in-depth perspective on the changing threat landscape including software vulnerability disclosures and exploits, malicious software (malware), and potentially unwanted software. Please follow up at: SIR Volume 6 (July through December, 2008), available in 10 languages or watch this movie.

You can join Microsoft Telemetry Service with a basic or an advanced membership:

Basic Membership

As a basic member, reports collected by Microsoft from you include standard computer information as well as threat identifier, source and destination IP and Port, URLs truncated to the fully qualified domain name (e.g., www.sub.domain.com), a one-way hash of the traffic data, and a globally unique identifier (GUID) to uniquely identify your computer. The GUID is a randomly generated number; it does not contain any personal information.

Advanced Membership

In addition to the information in the basic membership, if you opt to use the advanced telemetry membership, the reports collected from you by Microsoft include additional data such as full URL strings and Internet traffic samples captured by NIS. Advanced reports may unintentionally contain personal information. To the extent that any personal information is included in a report, Microsoft does not use the information to identify you or contact you. Telemetry reports track malware not people.

Advanced reports, naturally, provides much richer information than basic reporting, which helps Microsoft to improve precision and efficiency of threat mitigations.

To help protect your privacy, Microsoft Telemetry Service reports are encrypted using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

In conclusion, don’t wait for the first successful attack to join the service. Do it now! Just enable Forefront TMG Telemetry service in the Forefront TMG Getting Started Wizard:

Or right click the TMG server/array name, click properties and choose Join Microsoft Telemetry Service to select your participation type.

Author

Moshe Golan, Senior Program Manager – Forefront, GAPA

Reviewers

Avi Ben-Menahem, Principal Group Manager – Forefront, GAPA

Jeff Williams, Principal Group Program Manager - MMPC

Joe Faulhaber, Senior Program Manager - MMPC

Evgeny Skarbovsky, GAPA Senior Development Lead – Forefront, GAPA

Dotan Elharrar, Program Manager - Forefront

Asaf Rosenfeld, Software Developer Engineer – Forefront, GAPA

Nathan Bigman, Content Publishing Manager - Forefront