According to Securityfocus, Microsoft is doing some research around "honeymonkeys." The idea is to have many thousands of virtual machines surfing the web automatically simply to identify new threats against web clients. Pretty cool, if you can scale enough to get some coverage.

Even more interesting is how they will leverage the urls from spam and spyware reports coming in, by using a honeymonkey to probe the site like a user might. This growing collection of URLs, the "Exploit-Net" according to Microsoft, becomes the seedier neighborhood of the Web.

The concept is a cross between the honeypots that researchers use to masquerade as legitimate hosts and the bogus email addresses used by anti-spammers to collect spam mail, but also incorporates an active component to automatically "click" on every link.

I hope there are other researchers out there who will continue this type of research in search of the "zero day" exploits (exploits against vulnerabilities that are unknown to the general security world).