Five years, 50 million of lines of software code, five million testers and $6 billion dollars later, Windows Vista has hit the shelves. The backbone of the new operating system - and Microsoft has exhaustively applauded this aspect - is the security infrastructure that Windows Vista introduces.

However, Vista is neither foolproof nor perfect. The statement belongs to Jim Allchin, Microsoft Co-President, Platform and Services Division. And since the operating system was still in its development phase, Windows Vista has taken a few hits, from the security developers and from the hackers.

From the COSEINC's security expert Joanna Rutkowska that demonstrated back in August 2006 that the operating system was open to malicious code injections, to Sophos highlighting the fact that existent malware could compromise Vista, to Symantec, to Kaspersky and to the denial of service and privilege escalation vulnerability affecting the Client Server Run-Time Subsystem in Vista, the OS has proven its fragility.

Stephen Toulouse, senior product manager at Microsoft's trustworthy computing group also backed Allchin's take on the Windows Vista security by admitting that even from the initial stages of development the operating system was never going to reach a bulletproofed code. Toulouse however, as well as Allchin, have assured customers that the multi-tiered security structure of Vista will hold up.

"Given that Microsoft systems are very popular, cyber criminals will always be interested in finding vulnerabilities. We'll take an incurably optimistic approach, and not take Microsoft's previous security record, established over many years, into account. The fact is that neither the quality nor the quantity of barriers intended to protect against hackers play a significant role. In fact, the opposite is true: they simply stimulate the interest of a particular subsection of the computer underground," stated Alisa Shevchenko, Virus analyst, Kaspersky Lab.

And even if we do not take Microsoft's previous security record into account, the question is: now that Vista has exited from the in utero stage, is it onward to the slaughter for the operating system?

"The only significant factor is that hackers and virus writers will search for vulnerabilities - that much is clear. And if they are searching for vulnerabilities they will find them," added Shevchenko.