Remember the recent WGA hullabaloo? Well, check out this interesting tidbit that I found at DriverGuide:
While the first JavaScript method barely seemed worth mentioning as it would no doubt be easily fixed, this mechanism for bypassing the WGA piracy check might be more difficult for [Microsoft] to stop. Microsoft makes available and allows you to run a program called GenuineCheck.exe as an alternative to the ActiveX-based approach. If you set the GenuineCheck.exe program to run in Windows 2000 compatibility mode it will return a non-pirated code regardless of the actual legitimacy of your copy.[There has been yet another method discovered since, as well as a way to bypass WGA altogether by using an alternate browser with a new service called WindizUpdate.
P.S. All existing WGA-bypassing solutions have been disabled by Microsoft as of March 17, 2006. Refer to this wiki discussion for more recent developments. As of May 31, 2006, a working solution is the installation of a cracked LegitCheckControl.dll file (version 1.5.532.0), available here.]
Also, the FUD spread regarding the supposed "first Vista virus" (by no less than F-Secure, an anti-virus maker) is complete and utter bullshit upon closer examination: just because some attention-hungry geek wrote a few "proof-of-concept" scripts that act as a virus does not necessarily mean that the MSH ("Microsoft Command Shell, [...] a command line interface and scripting language [designed to replace] shells such as CMD.EXE, COMMAND.COM or 4NT.EXE") is at fault.
There are scripting capabilities on *nix too, and, despite being the de facto hacker tool, no one shouts that *nix is a breeding ground for viruses; virus writers, more like. Jason Cox eloquently put it this way at the Bink thread: "Virus/Spyware writters [sic] will always target the dominant OS, and if *nix was the dominant OS, you can rest assured they'd find a way to comprimise the system." Damn right.
Stephen Toulouse, of the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog has corroborated this, and added that "Monad is not included in the beta release of Windows Vista or in Windows Server 2003 R2" and is no even planned for Vista's final release. If you don't want your info to come from Microsoft, however, here's an excellent overview from DriverGuide:
The "virus" is simply a shell script which runs from the Vista equivalent of DOS. [...] MSH is nothing more than a shell, like DOS with a bigger command set and a better interface (it's more like any modern UNIX/Linux shell). So, just like you can write a shell script to create a directory, rename a file, launch a program or do practically any other thing (which is the main reason shell scripting exists), surprise, surprise you can write a shell script to spread itself! That's old news, it's been done, is being done, will be done. You give someone a shell and they'll write a shell script which can do bad things. There is no story here. This "virus" doesn't exploit any weakness in MSH, doesn't exploit any weakness in Vista. It's not that you could mail someone a script in an attachment and your e-mail client would let you click on the attachment and poof you're hosed. It's not that you will browse a webpage and trigger an MSH script to run. Now maybe vulnerabilities will be discovered that will allow MSH scripts to run in situations like I just mentioned [...] if that happens again, it's serious, and that needs to be addressed and is worth a news story.Finally, if you remember that attention whore's, Paul Thurott's, IE 7.0 bashing session, read his sleazy damage control write-up. Oh, sure, Paul; when you were shouting "Boycott IE," so loudly that Slashdot did an article on your antics, "some misread it as 'Boycott IE 7'"; right. I hope you had a fun time talking with the IE team, after calling IE "a cancer on the Web that must be stopped," you two-faced corporate hack. I think I'll close with a quote from an anonymous commenter on Thurott's retraction: "It's a shame your website doesn't comply with web standards."