It’s shortsighted because opening an exploitable vulnerability on somebody’s machine (and this has infected at least half a million machines) is already quite significant damage, even if there are no burning buildings. At a minimum, network administrators will have to spend a great deal of expensive labor to clean up this mess.

It’s premature in the sense that this root vulnerability’s not going to go away any time soon. The CDs will remain in circulation essentially forever, and (extrapolating from previous worm infections) there will be significant numbers of old unpatched and infected machines on the Internet for at least a decade. Any time a band of crackers wants to bootstrap a botnet, this will be one more pool of targets for them. The full damages from this rootkit are going to be felt by the Internet for years to come.