Distance Education

There's your problem...

In all seriousness, this is just another program for script kiddies to play with. Security follows the same pattern:

Crackers discover a security flaw
Linux gets a patch to fix said flaw
Crackers use it to screw up a few thousand windows computers
In the process of making the new Linux patch, a few minor glitches are discovered and fixed.
A few weeks later, a patch is released by microsoft - but it will only install on "Windows Genuine Advantage" certified systems

Wash, rinse, repeat. It's happened before (ping of death, for example), and it will happen again.

This is probably the most usable one out there, but similar mbr bootkits and bios rootkits have been produced. One actually loaded itself into the memory of pci cards and could survive even if the bios was overwritten.

Let me repeat that again: the company has targeted mainly windows because of its market share, and due to the generally greater technological knowlege of linux users, however I would imagine that this kind of thing could easily target, say, RHEL, or Ubuntu, or OsX with only minor modifications.

To fix this, presumably linux could refuse to load if it detects MBR modifications, but that is kind of... irritating.

Still, what I said holds: The technology will update to fix the issue.

And if it becomes an issue with linux, there'd probably be a warning placed on the loading screen or something as a temporary fix. I'd say the same for windows, but when it's a closed company working on it it would take a bit longer.