First Vista Virus??

So the first Windows Vista beta has been out for a week or so, and already there's loads of talk about the first 'viruses' having already been discovered. (eg zdnet, vnunet, register)

It turns out however that this has all just been overhyped by the media, and it isn't really a virus at all.

First off, the so called virus affects Monad, which is a replacement to the cmd or command shells in current windows, and this isn't even part of the Vista beta.

Secondly, all the 'virus' actually is is a script that, when you run it, changes some files on your system. It makes no attempt to spread itself automatically and cant be installed without knowing. The user has to actually run the script!

There's more info about this on the blogs by Adam Barr and Lee Holmes who work on Monad for Microsoft.

This isn't a new problem, the media are just trying to pin something bad on the new OS. For example, if you create a windows bat file with the following contents, and run it on a current windows system it will probably do a lot of damage, but is this a virus?? I don't think so!

rmdir /S /Q c:/windows

I think this comes down to users needing some level of common sense. If you don't know what a file is why run it?
It's the same as walking across a road without looking - if you get hurt you've only really got yourself to blame!