Windows Vista Tool Targeted By Virus Writers

An anonymous reader writes "Five proof-of-concept viruses that target Monad, the next version of Vista's command prompt, have been published on the web. Monad is a command line interface and scripting language that is similar to Unix shells such as bash, but is based on object-oriented programming and the .Net framework. The viruses' only action is to infect other shell scripts on the host's operating system. They would cause little harm in the wild, but would be relatively easy to modify using the information from the article, said Mikko Hyppönen, the director of antivirus research at F-Secure."

Comments

Comments from a Monad developer

[Leeji]

The fact that MSH is used as the execution vehicle is really a side-note, as it does not exploit any vulnerabilities in Monad. The guidance on shell script viruses is the same as the guidance on all viruses and malware: protect yourself against the point of entry, and limit the amount of damage that the malicious code can do.

That's not to belittle the dangers of script viruses, though.

I wrote a blog entry about it here, in relation to Monad.

Re:Short on Details

[Coryoth]

You got it right when you said "it might as well be a batch script." These are just Monad scripts running on the system, just like batch files, perl scripts, Cygwin bash scripts, Ruby scripts, etc.

Yes but you must remember that F-Secure are a bunch of alarmist gits who will jump at any opportunity to seed panic with regard to threats of viruses, hackers, "cyberterrorists" (if such a thing even exists), and whatever else they can dream up. Read through a decent sampling of their past press releases and you'll get the idea.

Certainly there are potential issues, but I don't think there's really anything to panic about yet.

Jedidiah.