By the time I joined the security beat eight years later, I would always make a point of asking hackers, “I know you hate the vendors, but of all of them, who do you hate least?” The answer was always the same. “Microsoft,” they would tell me. “They turned their shit around.” The ripple effect of Gates’s memo could be seen far from Redmond, in underground dark web forums and in hotel rooms at the big security conferences. There, in the shadows, a growing number of defense contractors, intelligence analysts, and cybercriminals started doling out higher rewards to hackers who promised to keep
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