Microsoft is promising Forefront customers that by joining the Microsoft Telemetry community they will have the chance to impact directly its security products, by boosting the quality of the protection delivered. In this regard, Moshe Golan, senior program manager, Forefront, GAPA invited Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) Beta 3 testers to embrace the Microsoft Telemetry Service. Relying on Malware Protection and Network Inspection System, (NIS) detection reporting, Forefront TMG Telemetry Reporting is designed to phone home to the Redmond company and deliver information on the malicious code or attacks detected. Golan explained that customers had the option of becoming a basic or an advanced member of the Microsoft Telemetry Service.

“Basic Membership: As a basic member, reports collected by Microsoft from you include standard computer information as well as threat identifier, source and destination IP and Port, URLs truncated to the fully qualified domain name (e.g., www.sub.domain.com), a one-way hash of the traffic data, and a globally unique identifier (GUID) to uniquely identify your computer. The GUID is a randomly generated number; it does not contain any personal information,” Golan stated.

Microsoft released the third Beta of Forefront Threat Management Gateway in the first half of June 2009. Forefront TMG is designed as the evolution of the Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA Server), and it provides customers with the possibility to help shape threat mitigations put together by the Redmond company. On top of increasing the level of security for customers, Microsoft uses the data harvested through the Telemetry Service to deliver its Security Intelligence Reports, a complex view of the threat landscape.

“Advanced Membership: In addition to the information in the basic membership, if you opt to use the advanced telemetry membership, the reports collected from you by Microsoft include additional data such as full URL strings and Internet traffic samples captured by NIS. Advanced reports may unintentionally contain personal information. To the extent that any personal information is included in a report, Microsoft does not use the information to identify you or contact you. Telemetry reports track malware not people,” Golan added. “Advanced reports, naturally, provides much richer information than basic reporting, which helps Microsoft to improve precision and efficiency of threat mitigations.”

In order to start sending information to Microsoft, users of Forefront TMG Beta 3 need to enable the Forefront TMG Telemetry service in the product's Getting Started Wizard. In addition, they can also access Properties by right clicking the TMG server/array name and selecting Join Microsoft Telemetry Service.

Forefront Threat Management Gateway Beta 3 is available for download here.