Monad will not be in Windows Vista
I wrote earlier about “proof of concept” viruses that targeted Monad, the next generation command shell from Microsoft. There had been talk that Monad would ship with Windows Vista and so some people were saying these “proof of concept” virii were the first to target Vista. Well, according to the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog that is wrong, Monad will not ship with Vista so these aren’t Vista viruses. I thought most of the articles I had seen had made it clear that it was uncertain when Monad would be available, possibly Vista (now we know it won’t). (The next Exchange Server release?)
In the post, Stephen Toulouse points out that these viruses are not a threat to any system that has not installed Monad and that you shouldn’t be running Monad anyway because it’s still in Beta testing stage. Again, I thought all the writeups I saw were clear that Monad was the target, but apparently there was some confusion. Anyway, he continues that no one knows how malicious software writers will target the next release of Windows. Essentially “stay tuned”.
Cnet news has some details on the issue as well. They reaffirm the statement of Monad shipping with Exchange Server 12 in the second half of 2006 as a statement Microsoft has affirmed. They also point out that Monad could be released seperately at some point.