Microsoft To Block the Spyware Threat

Speaking Friday at the Computer History Museum, Gates said the industry is "halfway to solving spam," with good filtering available but the message authentication piece remaining to be solved.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said he's never had a computer virus, but that adware and malware have him ticked off enough that Microsoft plans to do something about them. Precisely what that might be Gates didn't say, although the figure "hundreds of millions" of dollars was mentioned.

More serious, according to Gates, are the problems of identity theft and phishing. He said a solution would be an "info card" users could view to confirm the identity and authenticity of Web sites, thus making it more difficult for criminals to make their sites appear legitimate.

The malware/adware threat is great enough, Gates said, that Microsoft is investing "hundreds of millions" of its $5 billion annual R&D budget toward solving it.

Individual computers need to be "isolated by default," Gates said, in order to prevent the spread of viruses and malware. He said technology should make it impossible for criminals to scan and probe networked computers for vulnerabilities.

Asked if he'd ever personally been hit by a computer virus, Gates responded, "I haven't had a virus on my machine ... basically ever." But he added that machines at his home had been infected with "malware or adware" requiring him to run scanning software on them.

"I think most of these security problems are solvable," Gates said, adding that passwords are becoming "the weak link" in security.
Microsoft has said it is working on anti-virus software that will be based on technology it obtained from its recent GeCAD and Pelican Software acquisitions.

When Gates was asked at the Computer History Museum which technologies haven't lived up to his hopes, he cited ink and voice recognition. Both, he said, have taken much more development time than he initially expected but are beginning to bear fruit.

Gates predicted that Asian markets would be the first to widely adopt speech recognition for general computing tasks.