The Microsoft Security Response Center Blog has a post that describes a potential issue with Vista’s speech recognition feature. They say it’s nothing to worry about, the stars would have to align to take advantage of it. So can the ‘hackers’ find a way to make it work?

They point out that if someone could take advantage of this issue, they still couldn’t get by UAC, as it can’t be manipulated by voice commands. By Default. So, one of those stars that need alignment is the chance that someone might change their UAC settings, something not so difficult to imagine.

They say it would be difficult due to “speaker and microphone placement” as well as “microphone feedback” and the “clarity of the dictation”. It sounds as if they aren’t so confident in the ability of speech recognition at all! So is their saving grace the simple fact that speech recognition doesn’t work well enough to begin with?

Could a voice or video file sent in an e-mail lead to disaster? Could a friend (or foe) talking to you via voice chat take control of your computer? Heck, could someone calling into a radio station talk show shutdown your computer? Time will tell as there are surely those out there trying to figure out how to make this very novel method of attack a reality.