- As we posted recently, “Preliminary versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 and Vista, aka Longhorn, were turned loose for beta testing yesterday, events eagerly awaited by every virus writer and hacker on the planet.”

Then came the news that an Austrian virus writer had published five proof-of-concept viruses,

Now, Bill and the Boyz have "hit back at reports of the first virus for its new version of Windows, dubbed Vista" and "sought to squash talk of Vista viruses," says the BBC, going on to quote Microsoft's Stephen Toulouse as saying in a blog posting, "These reports pose no risk for Microsoft customers."

MSH, or Microsoft Command Shell and code-named Monad, "is a command line interface and scripting language that’s basically a replacement for shells such as CMD.EXE, COMMAND.COM or 4NT.EXE and which will ship in 2006, says F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen.

And of it, "I can't overstate how many seemingly millions of hours of admin work (I did large-scale AFS, AIX, Linux, etc. administration in former lives) Monad would have saved me," posts James Manning on his Microsoft blog back in June. "Tons of perl, of course, but more so awk '{print $6}' and cut -c48-52 and egrep -i 'foo|bar' and the like."

"I think any technology should be judged at some level by the “play metric” - when you first see it demo'd, how much you want to turn around and spend the next X hours/days playing around with it. C# had a very high play metric for me. Monad just about blows the roof off my play metric scale."

However, the viruses have never been presented as a threat.

To the contrary, as F-Secure said in its original posting, "These proof-of-concept viruses will never became a real-world problem, but the case is interesting historically, as these are the first viruses for a totally new platform."

See:-
eagerly awaited - Microsoft Vista and IE 7 betas, p2pnet, July 28, 2005
proof-of-concept - World's first 'Vista' virus, p2pnet, August 5, 2005
BBC - Reports of Vista virus rebutted, August 8, 2005
Microsoft blog - fellow pro or amateur sysadmins, rejoice with the power of Monad!, June 18, 2005