August 8th, 2005
The Vista virus that wasn't
After news reports surfaced last week that Vista’s first vulnerabilities were beginning to surface and then ZDNet blogger George Ou pointed out that the culprits were not vulnerabilities but rather malicious code, Paul Thurrott has thoroughly debunked the unfair malignment of the next version of Windows. According to Thurrott, Monad – the Microsoft Scripting Host (MSH) that’s needed to support the malicious code – isn’t in the beta version of Vista. But even more importantly, it won’t be in the final shipping version. In his blog post, Thurrott says:
And while MSH may be installable in Windows Vista Beta 1, the environment does not come with Beta 1 and will not appear in future betas or the final release, Microsoft says. Furthermore, the new Windows Vista security subsystem isn’t even enabled in Beta 1.
So, with Vista, Microsoft is in the clear. So far. At the end of his post, Thurrott passes the buck saying "There’s no Windows Vista virus out there, folks. Anyone care to write about it? Tag, you’re it." Done. [Update: ZDNet debunked the FUD too, on Aug 5.]
