It was going to afford me the chance to get at least a bidding process where the bidders were bidding while it was zero day.

IDGNS: What do you mean by "non-zero-day?

Macaulay: That the patch was going to be available and possibly even automatically rolled out to the users of this software. Today there's no defense. You, the user of this software are going to get hacked. By the time the auction would have closed, it would have been non-zero-day and it would have been patched.

IDGNS: So the auction was sent to end on April 8. When is the patch supposed to come out then?

Macaulay: On the 8th.

IDGNS: You said earlier that this flaw would work on 90 percent of systems out there. Why target Vista?

Macaulay: I had just done a lot of my work in the past on Windows. I'm a very avid Linux users, but I haven't been working on Linux exploits since 2001. I'm really good at the Windows platform right now because that's where I've been focusing all my attention for almost a decade. To go back to Linux now would be too much of a learning experience.

IDGNS: A lot has been made of this contest by fans of different operating systems. What would you take away from this?

Macaulay: People want to believe that they're right about what they're using. They're very much attached to it and they use it every day, and they really want to believe that they're doing the right thing. There's no difference in my mind between any of them.

IDGNS: Are you going to enter the contest next year?

Macaulay: Yeah, get the trifecta going on. I've already got a number of things probably that I could use.

IDGNS: What operating system will you target?

Macaulay: Maybe Linux, just for fun.