I am pleased to announce that two members of the FSL research team received Microsoft Security MVP Awards this year. Namely Wayne Porter, Sr. Director of Greynets Research and Chris Boyd, Director of Malware Research. This is my first time to receive this honor but this is the second year running for the indefatigable Chris Boyd, a.k.a. PaperGhost.

The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award is an annual award that is given to outstanding members of Microsoft's peer-to-peer communities, and is based on the past year's contributions those members make in those communities online and offline.

You can learn more about the awards at the Microsoft MVP FAQ or check out the official MSFT MVP site.

A little history and color about the awards from Wikipedia:

The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Program is an award and recognition program run by Microsoft. Microsoft MVPs are volunteers who have been awarded for providing technical expertise towards communities supporting Microsoft products or technologies. An MVP is awarded for contributions over the past year.

The MVP program grew out of the developer community: rumor has it the initials stood for "Most Valuable Professional", as the initial MVPs were drawn from the online peer support communities such as Usenet and CompuServe. It has since grown to include other types of products, and other avenues of contribution.

A posting from Tamar Granor on the Universal Thread web site gives this account of the origin of the MVP program.

"Way back in the dark ages, Microsoft provided a great deal of technical support on CompuServe. The CompuServe FoxPro forum was extremely busy and Calvin Hsia, then an independent developer, now Developer Lead on the Fox team, created what we called "Calvin's List." It was a listing of the number of postings by person, including info on both messages sent and received. Being in the top 10 on Calvin's List any month was an accomplishment, though we discussed whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. "

As the story goes, some of the Microsoft people jumped on Calvin's List as a way to identify high contributors, and thus was born the MVP program.