Stephen Toulouse, a program manager for Microsoft's Security Response Center who often served as the public face for the company's security woes on the MSRC blog, is taking a new job with the Windows Vista team. His focus, not surprisingly, will be on operating system security.

Toulouse's says his new role will be more proactive, as opposed to the reactive nature of MSRC, which responds to new security threats with patches and advisories. He will begin with a focus on Vista and continue that work with other Microsoft products.

"Security is to Windows Vista like the Internet was to Windows 95. It’s going kick off a fundamental change in the way people think about security and operating systems. It’s going to be a platform on which a lot of current problems will have new solutions," Toulouse wrote on his Web site.

"And it doesn’t stop there, that level of effort is also a huge part of Office 2007, Longhorn Server, the next version of Exchange, all our various security product offerings, etc etc. That’s a cool thing to be a part of and I look forward to it," he added. "I’ll miss security response, but four years is a long time to carry a pager."

Toulouse says the MSRC has come a long way and will continue its work without him. The group has played a critical role in Microsoft establishing a solid infrastructure to deal with new threats, introducing expanded security bulletins, monthly webcasts and podcasts, technical articles, as well as worldwide presentations on security.

"We continue to have success in emergency response too, from the huge suite of deployment tools to make sure that customers can get updates on systems more quickly, to working to help contain threats through industry partnerships, and bringing criminals who write malicious attacks to justice," said Toulouse.

"We've come a long long way since that morning in January of 2003 when I found out about Slammer from my car radio."