Microsoft reaches for olive branch after public dustup with 0-day researcher

Following days of criticism from the security community, Redmond dials back rhetoric, insists vulnerability hunters not in its legal crosshairs

Microsoft has moved to calm an increasingly noisy backlash from the security community after appearing to threaten legal action against a researcher who spent the past several weeks dumping Windows zero-days onto the internet.

In a statement published on Monday, Redmond said it has "no intention to pursue action against individuals conducting or publishing security research”, a noticeably softer position than the one it adopted just days earlier when it condemned a string of public vulnerability disclosures and invoked its Digital Crimes Unit.

The updated statement follows a public feud with a researcher known as Nightmare-Eclipse, who released multiple Windows zero-days along with proof-of-concept exploit code. Several of those vulnerabilities have since been exploited in the wild, turning what might have remained an obscure disclosure dispute into...

Copyright of this story solely belongs to theregister.com. To see the full text click HERE