Indeed, both Tom Davis, head of government affairs for consulting firm Deloitte, and Scott Charney, head of Microsoft's TrustworthyComputing division were offered the position and turned it down.
"We're currently unaware of any attacks trying to use the claimed vulnerability or of customer impact, " said Dave Forstrom, the director of Microsoft's TrustworthyComputing group, in a statement.
The problem is so pressing that Bill Gates pulled Microsoft's 7, 000 systems programmers off their jobs for all of February for a TrustworthyComputing initiative aimed at making more secure operating systems.