Microsoft Adds Former Symantec CEO And IBM Exec John Thompson To Board

Microsoft has added a new board member today—John W. Thompson, the chief executive officer of Virtual Instruments and former chairman and CEO of Symantec. This brings Microsoft’s board’s size to 10 members.
Thompson currently serves as CEO of Virtual Instruments, which offers products that ensure the performance and availability of applications deployed in virtualized and private cloud computing environments. Thompson also served as chairman and CEO of Symantec from 1999 to 2009, where he grew revenues from $600 million to over $6 billion. He stepped down as CEO of Symantec in 2009, and stepped down from Symantec’s board of directors in 2011.
Previously, Thompson held a number of executive positions at IBM, including sales, marketing, software development and general manager of IBM Americas. Thompson was also reportedly being considered as Commerce Secretary under the Obama Administration.
“John has extraordinary technology and business expertise, and we are delighted that he is joining Microsoft’s board of directors,” said Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman.
In addition to Thompson, Microsoft’s board of directors consists of Gates, CEO Steve Ballmer; Dina Dublon, former chief financial officer of JPMorgan Chase; Raymond Gilmartin, former chairman, president and CEO of Merck & Co. Inc.; Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings; Dr. Maria M. Klawe, president, Harvey Mudd College; David F. Marquardt, general partner at August Capital; Charles H. Noski, vice chairman of Bank of America Corp.; and Dr. Helmut G. W. Panke, former chairman of the board of management at BMW AG.
Symantec has had a complex relationship with Microsoft over the past, which makes Thompson’s appointment interesting. As described by ZDNet in 2007, Thompson has previously described Microsoft as a partner, ally and competitor to Symantec.

Symantec code theft: Hackers 'attempted extortion'

Hackers tried to extort money in exchange for keeping source code private, security firm Symantec has said.

It comes as hackers made public emails from law enforcement agents posing as a Symantec employee.
Officials pretended to be the security firm in order to "offer" the hackers $50,000 (£32,000).
However, more source code has allegedly been released after negotiations apparently broke down.
Symantec said it had contacted US law enforcement after being approached by the hackers last month.
In a lengthy series of emails, law enforcement agents posed as a fake Symantec employee named Sam Thomas.
The character was involved in lengthy email discussions with a hackers believed to be from India-based group the Lords of Dharmaraja, part of the wider Anonymous collective.
Agents, posing as Sam, told the hackers: "We can pay you $2,500 per month for the first three months.
"In exchange, you will make a public statement on behalf of your group that you lied about the hack (as you previously stated).
"Once that's done, we will pay the rest of the $50,000 to your account and you can take it all out at once. That should solve your problem."
At one point, the hackers suspected FBI involvement, writing: "say hi to FBI agents".
Stolen code By the end of the email discussion, negotiations began to stall.
At 04:46 GMT on Tuesday, an account belonging to Anonymous suggested that more than a gigabyte of source code from the company's PC Anywhere software had been uploaded to torrent website The Pirate Bay.Symantec would not confirm that this was the case.

"In January an individual claiming to be part of the 'Anonymous' group attempted to extort a payment from Symantec in exchange for not publicly posting stolen Symantec source code they claimed to have in their possession," the company said in a statement.
"Symantec conducted an internal investigation into this incident and also contacted law enforcement, given the attempted extortion and apparent theft of intellectual property.
"The communications with the person(s) attempting to extort the payment from Symantec were part of the law enforcement investigation.
"Given that the investigation is still ongoing, we are not going to disclose the law enforcement agencies involved and have no additional information to provide."
At risk Last month, users of PC Anywhere software were told by the company to disable its use where possible.
The company confirmed that "old" source code stolen by the hackers had exposed vulnerabilities in the program which allows remote access to computers.
Other programs affected include Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition, Norton Internet Security and Norton Systemworks (Norton Utilities and Norton Go Back).
However, only PC Anywhere is said to be at risk. Symantec has been releasing patches and further information via its website.

 BBC