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Security vuln in Vista/XP - rootkit exploit in the wild

2 min read

This thread's last reply is from . Advice, software, and links below may be out of date — treat specific steps and download links with caution.

FYI…

- http://preview.tinyurl.com/2lgp5u
January 05, 2008 (Donna's SecurityFlash) -"In early Devember 2007 a new rootkit that hides itself in the Master Boot Record (MBR) of a users disk was spotted in the wild. Up until then this was more of a proof of concept (POC). This goes to show how much effort rootkit authors are putting in to creating new ways of evading Anti Rootkit software. This is a new vector of attack for malware writers and gives them control from outside the Operating System. This rootkit is using the MBR flaw. The MBR can be written to from within Windows.
The rootkit installs itself ( 244K ) on the last sectors of the users disk and then modifies other sectors including sector 0. The code is run before your PC boots up into XP, Vista or NT and has full control of the boot process which means it can install and run any application it wants without you, XP, Vista or NT knowing about it."

> http://www.antirootkit.com/blog/2008/01/03…it-in-the-wild/

> http://www2.gmer.net/mbr/

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More…

- http://preview.tinyurl.com/29la7z
January 8, 2008 (Symantec Security Response Weblog) - "…The bad news is that this time the MBR rootkit is not in the form of a PoC demonstration, but is an active threat found in the wild and infecting computers through drive-by exploits via Web sites. Symantec detects this threat as Trojan.Mebroot*… The main problem is that some versions of Microsoft Windows allow programs to overwrite disk sectors directly (including the MBR) from user mode, without restrictions. As such, writing a new MBR into Sector 0 as a standard user is a relatively easy task. This issue has been known for quite some time, and still affects the 2K/XP families…
Note: The rootkit cannot be removed while the OS is running, as it must be removed while the rootkit code itself is not running. During our tests, running the "fixmbr" command from within the Windows Recovery Console successfully removed the malicious MBR entry. To help prevent similar attacks in the future, and if your system BIOS includes the Master Boot Record write-protection feature, now is a good time to enable it!…"
* http://preview.tinyurl.com/296lef

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