Rootkit May Be Behind Windows Blue Screen

L3sPau1 writes "A rootkit infection may be the cause of a Windows Blue Screen of Death issue experienced by Windows XP users who applied the latest round of Microsoft patches. It appears that the affected Windows PCs had the rootkit infection prior to deploying the Microsoft patches. Researcher Patrick W. Barnes, investigating the issue, has isolated the infection to the Windows atapi.sys file, a driver used by Windows to connect hard drives and other components. Barnes identified the infection as the Tdss-rootkit, which surfaced last November and has been spreading quickly, creating zombie machines for botnet activity."

Comments

Sounds like a good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

That's one way of forcing users to take care of an infection.

Re:Ah, well, that lets Microsoft off the hook then

[Com2Kid]

After all, there's no way that their malware tool could have spotted it

If a system has been rooted, nothing short of booting to another OS from a known clean media, mounting the disk read only, and scanning, is guaranteed to detect a root kit.

That'd make updates a real pain in the arse to install...