When asked if the company had received had taken a leaf out of the open-source book, his response came with a chuckle.

"Let me answer [like] this--buffer overruns, we know how to fix them now," Stathakopoulos said.

"I think in the industry in general there are lessons to be learned from us, and from anybody who's dealing with security," he added.

The security chief drew parallels between a recent code-audit undertaken by the Windows 2003 team and practices that have been undertaken in the Unix community.

"The Unix community took time and reviewed the code and had similar processes," he said.

While Stathakopoulos says Microsoft can learn from the wider community, there are some out there who are acting irresponsibly in the security space.

"I'm not too sure I'm comfortable with someone taking exploit code and posting it on the Web... if nothing else they put people at risk," he said.

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