Security researchers look beyond Vista

That was the message that some security professionals took away from BlueHat, an event last week on Microsoft's campus that allows security researchers to mingle with Microsoft developers.

"One of the messages we got was to look in the future for [our products] to not be so successful," said Pedram Amini, manager of security research at 3Com's Tipping Point division. That's because Microsoft is applying a lot of the technologies used by security researchers in-house, making the third-party techniques not as effective, he said. The improved security in Microsoft's newest software products may leave some security researchers looking elsewhere for work.

For example, he said that Microsoft Office has been susceptible to fault by fuzzing, an automated technique for finding software faults when access to the code isn't available. But Microsoft has recently put more effort into using fuzzing itself, so now third-party fuzzing technologies are unlikely to be as necessary for Office 2007.