Joe Grand, who formerly used the hacker name Kingpin, at his home in Portland, Ore., with an RFID card reader he designed. (Leah Nash for The Washington Post)

‘Hackers are like water’

L0pht’s legacy is a mixed one. The group was among the pioneers of a system called “responsible disclosure,” still widely used today, in which researchers who find bugs give companies a set amount of time to make fixes before security flaws are announced to the world. Some companies now go a step further, offering cash rewards called “bug bounties” to encourage hackers to search for problems — and ideally find them ahead of criminals and spies.

Microsoft eventually became more serious about security. It didn’t have much choice: Major customers told Gates to either do better or lose their business. In a memo in January 2002 — something of a bookend to the one from 1995 — Gates declared that a new security initiative was “the highest priority for all the work we are doing.”

The move initially drew some skepticism. “When I told friends I was going to Microsoft to do security . . . most of them laughed at me because I used ‘Microsoft’ and ‘security’ in the same sentence,” said Scott Charney, a former Justice Department official hired in 2002. He is now corporate vice president for Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft.

Microsoft pulled thousands of engineers off of product development to overhaul the company’s systems for designing and building software. Gates sent one group of officials to a retreat at a historic wooden home more commonly used for weddings, in nearby Bellevue, Wash., about a 15-minute drive from Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond. Charney said, “Basically some people were sent there and told, don’t come back until you have an answer.”

But the Internet did not suddenly become secure. The company’s newfound focus on security took years to bear fruit, most notably with the arrival of Windows Vista in 2006 and Office 2010 a few years later. Because of a need for “backward compatibility” — meaning older and newer versions of Microsoft products work easily together — old flaws lingered in the online world for many years after they were fixed in newly released software.

The federal government in the past year finally has replaced hundreds of thousands of computers running Windows XP — an operating system first released in 2001, months before Gates’s call to arms on product security — after the company withdrew free support after nearly 13 years.

But as Microsoft’s products became more secure, hackers began feasting on alternative targets that did not get similar overhauls.

“Hackers are like water,” said Vigna, the computer scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “They always go for the path of least resistance. . . . If you put a plug in place, they will find another crack.”

At the root is an issue raised by L0pht in its Senate testimony: The business incentives within the tech industry favor growth over security. And once companies get big enough that security is a major concern — as eventually happened to Microsoft — it’s extremely difficult to retrofit rigorous protections into systems built without them.

Thompson, the Tennessee Republican who chaired the Senate panel in 1998 and left Congress in 2003, said in a recent interview that Internet security is the kind of problem the government has trouble fixing. “Number one, it’s very difficult, and number two, there’s no immediate political payoff for anyone.”