Sharing some personal experience with MSRC:
First upfront disclaimer: I've not reported many vulnerabilities to them so far, but some high profile ones like CVE-2025-53773 and CVE-2020-16875. Mainly because I was never very active in Windows specific security research, only as a code reviewer for proprietary software. So I can't claim I'm an expert in dealing with MSRC.
The few times I have dealt with them though showed one pattern: There was always a political and corporate communication angle to any conversation and interaction. and that was much stronger than with any other of the many corporations I had to deal with over the years. Where for other vendors the technical details and impact was always first, it felt like there was a filter in my interactions that delayed communication. I didn't even get an update for when something was fixed.
On top of it it was never transparent who is actually looking at the vulnerabilities. In case of CVE-2020-16875 the bug was not patched correctly at least two times, despite me proposing a patch and offering help looking at theirs.
I've met a few MSRC folks at conferences over the past last years and everyone was super nice and skilled! So what we can conclude: "A fish rots from the head down"
Microsoft should just hand over the process to people who manage it well and own their mistakes as a corporation in a proper way. Others have successfully done it before!
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