Windows Vista Is Hit By New Viruses

Just a few days after the release of the first Windows Vista Beta 1, security experts have discovered a new family of viruses, which are targeting Monad, the next version of Microsoft's command prompt.

According to Mikko Hyppönen, the director of antivirus research at F-Secure, the person responsible for this is a hacker, calling himself "Second Part To Hell". "Second Part To Hell" is the pseudonym of an Austrian-based hacker who also goes by the name Mario, Hyppönen says

MSH, or Microsoft Command Shell, is a command line interface and scripting language. It's basically a replacement for shells such as CMD.EXE, COMMAND.COM or 4NT.EXE and will ship in 2006. As a command-line front end, MSH resembles many Unix shells quite a bit, reports F-Secure.

Hyppönen said also that F-Secure has named the virus family Danom (Monad in reverse). The good news is that Hyppönen says that the Danom family is disruptive, but not capable of causing significant damage to Windows users.

"These are proof-of-concept viruses," he says, "where virus writers want to break new ground and write the first viruses for a new platform."

Microsoft has included Monad as a tool that will be used by only advanced users and Hyppönen consider that Microsoft should not offer the software as part of the standard Windows Vista package. This would make the software less prevalent, and therefore less attractive to virus writers, he says.

"As a power user myself I would love to have it in my own computer, but not in my mother's computer", he said.

The possibility of MSH viruses was forecasted last year by researcher Eric Chien (of Symantec) in his presentation in the Virus Bulletin 2004 conference titled "The return of script viruses - an overview of Microsoft Shell."