Researchers at Microsoft have been quietly finding -- and helping to fix -- security defects in products made by third-party vendors, including Apple and Google.

This month alone, the MSVR (Microsoft Security Vulnerability Research) team released advisories to document vulnerabilities in WordPress and Apple's Safari browser and in July, software flaws were found and fixed in Google Picasa and Facebook.

The MSVR program, launched two three years ago, gives Microsoft researchers freedom to audit the code of third-party software and work in a collaborative way with the affected vendor to get those issues fixed before they are publicly compromised.

The team's work gained prominence in 2009 when a dangerous security hole in Google Chrome Frame was found and fixed but it's not very well known that the team has spent the last year disclosing hundreds of security defects in third-party software.

Since July 2010, Microsoft said the MSVR team identified and responsibly disclosed 109 different software vulnerabilities affecting a total of 38 vendors.