Security Innovation, an authority in application security assessment and training, announced today that Jason Taylor, Chief Technology Officer, was recognized as Microsoft® Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) in the category of Developer Security. The Microsoft MVP Award is an annual award that recognizes active and credible experts who willingly share their high quality, real world expertise with users and the Microsoft Communities.

Individuals are nominated for the Microsoft MVP Award by their peers or by Microsoft employees, and each nominee's contributions are then compared to the other candidates' contributions for the same year. MVPs reach out and contribute to online and offline communities through a broad range of channels: online forums, wikis, and technical guides; and their own podcasts, Web sites and blogs. Mr. Taylor is a regular external reviewer, contributor and primary author for the Microsoft Patterns & Practices security guidance. He’s been a content contributor to numerous Microsoft online properties for cloud security, software security, and regulatory compliance in the form of articles, videos, whitepapers, eLearning, etc. He has co-authored five Patterns & Practices Guides, and over 100 Patterns & Practices articles.

“The Microsoft MVP Award provides us the unique opportunity to celebrate and honor Jason’s significant contributions and say ‘Thank you for your technical leadership’,” said Mike Hickman, Director of Community Engagement, Microsoft Corporation.

“Security Innovation has been conducting cutting-edge research in the field of application security for more than ten years and is continually developing, refining, and sharing this research with the community at large,” said Ed Adams, CEO, Security Innovation. “Jason is at the core of many of these initiatives; he shares a true passion for secure software development. His willingness and desire to share his expertise with the technical community has undoubtedly helped thousands of individuals to understand how to reduce application security risk.”

Mr. Taylor’s accomplishments while previously serving in various leadership roles at Microsoft are numerous. With Loren Kohnfelder, he co-created STRIDE, an industry recognized vulnerability classification system and DREAD, a technique to qualify risk. He grew the Internet Explorer security test team from a solitary operation to the leading application security test team at Microsoft. Later, he built the Test Model Toolkit, which won a Best Practice Award and led to an in-person briefing with Bill Gates. Jason’s long experience in application security has been incorporated into Security Innovation’s application assessment methodologies and eLearning training platform. Mr. Taylor was the visionary and designer of courses such as “Introduction to Threat Modeling” and “Creating Secure Code for ASP.Net,” which have been taught in many of the world's largest technology organizations.

About Jason Taylor

Mr. Taylor leads the strategic direction for all technology initiatives and manages world-class development teams for the company's product lines. He has spent his career focused on application development and testing with a primary focus on application security. His unrivaled understanding of application behavior provided the impetus for Security Innovation’s industry pioneering fault injection tool, Holodeck Enterprise Edition, and critical enhancements to the company’s internal testing and development tools.

Mr. Taylor has published and co-authored several whitepapers, guides and books including:

• Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server with J.D. Meier of Microsoft
• Improving Web Services Security with Microsoft Patterns & Practices
• Application Architecture Guide 2.0 with Microsoft Patterns & Practices
• Security Engineering Explained with Microsoft Patterns & Practices
• Security Threats: Risks, Protection & Limitations for CIO Update

Security Innovation has established unparalleled expertise across Microsoft platforms and development environments. The two companies maintain a lengthy and successful relationship, collaborating on numerous application security initiatives, code reviews, penetration tests, development and research projects:

• More than 50 direct engagements with various Microsoft groups that include penetration testing, code reviews, research/competitive analysis, customer-facing guidance creation, custom development and training.
• Several research projects that received high visibility and acclaim, including direct briefing to Bill Gates
• A.C.E. certified as a third party penetration test organization
• VisualStudio Integration Partner
• Member of the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) Pro Network, and close relationship with Microsoft Security Engineering Group for SDL-related work.
• Co-authored 5 Patterns & Practices Guides

About Security Innovation

Security Innovation is an established leader in the application security space and offers solutions based on the three pillars of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC): standards, education and assessment. On a mission to help eliminate the root cause of most data breaches – insecure software applications – Security Innovation helps organizations build internal expertise, uncover critical vulnerabilities and integrate security into their software development lifecycle.

The company’s flagship products include TeamMentor, “out of the box” secure development standards and TeamProfessor, the industry’s largest library of application security eLearning courses. The TeamProfessor eLearning platform serves as the foundation for security awareness and application vulnerability assessment, remediation and prevention skills development. It offers more than 45 courses and over 100 hours of real-world content, with popular topics including Mobile Security (awareness and secure development for Android, iPhone, and Blackberry), secure coding (.NET, Java, C/C++, C#, PHP, Oracle), PCI-DSS and OWASP.