REDMOND, Wash. — Aug. 30, 2010 — Since 2006, Gina Bentley-Nehrhood has had an important mission: ensure that developers and OEMs have critical security updates for Windows Embedded Standard 7 at their fingertips.
In addition to highlighting patches and updates for critical security vulnerabilities in Windows Embedded Standard 7, Bentley-Nehrhood acts as a liaison to the Microsoft Security Response Team to ensure that all the issues testers have identified are fixed and communicated to developers.
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“My role is to ensure that if there are any issues or vulnerabilities within Windows Embedded Standard 7, that the right people are working together to resolve them as quickly as possible,” says Bentley-Nehrhood, program manager for the Windows Sustained Engineering (WSE) team. “We do this by testing the updates in our WSE team to ensure that everything is working as expected.”
Bentley-Nehrhood, along with her team, helps ensure that critical updates are made available for many systems people use on a daily basis. For example, if you’re using a credit card at the mall, the device taking your credit card information could be running Windows Embedded Standard 7.
The WSE team, along with the Security Response Team, stays ahead of people who try to hack into these systems and take critical data such as credit card numbers. The teams need to stay one step ahead of the hackers at all times, provide security updates before issues arise, and work to ensure Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance.
In a recent blog post on Aug. 17, Bentley-Nehrhood noted that the August 2010 Security Bulletin was available for OEMs and developers to access. Her team conducts a live webcast each month to facilitate inquiries from Microsoft partners and ensure they have open lines of communication with OEMs and developers.
Not familiar with the Security Bulletin? It’s a hub for security updates for several Windows platforms, ensuring that they can all be found in a central location. Part of Bentley-Nehrhood’s job is to ensure that each update is clearly delineated in the Security Bulletin so developers can quickly ascertain whether or not the specific pack is relevant to their device.
Bentley-Nehrhood is a contributor to the MSDN blog Windows Embedded Standard. For more information on the August 2010 security updates as well as archives for previous updates, please visit the Microsoft TechNet website.
