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Microsoft Confirms Update-Linked BSODs Required Compromised Machines
Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft on Thursday confirmed that the blue screen of death issues that affected a slew of users after the latest batch of Patch Tuesday updates is the result of an existing infection by the Alureon rootkit. There was widespread speculation after the patch release that simply installing the MS10-015 update was causing the BSOD condition on some Windows 32-bit machines. However, Microsoft said at the time this was not the case and started an investigation into the problem. In an advisory released Thursday, the company said that it now was confident that the restart problem is being caused by the Alureon rootkit." That seems a harsh way to find out that your Windows machine has been rooted.
The malware has been updated so that it won't cause a crash.
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Don't worry, it looks like the malware authors have already rushed out an update for their rootkit
http://www.prevx.com/blog/143/BSOD-after-MS-TDL-authors-apologize.html
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Actually, they do. However, Windows Update will apply patches before doing malware removal - I've never quite understood why that was the preferred order.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
it was probably about 6 years ago when a number of goverment offices American Express, and others including CNN had their computers BSODing. CNN even stayed on the air for a few hours just talking about how the computers were all rebooting. The cause of that was that the computers were part of a botnet and an update to the botnet caused BSODs.
In plain language, many government computers and businesses computers have been infected without them knowing it. And as I mentioned, large companies with financial ties like American Express. You can not secure Windows without unplugging it from the network. There was a CIO of one company which got hacked and he ended up quiting saying something much the same. Businesses who insist on Windows are insisting on something which is very very difficult to secure.
Oh, I assure you, they know about it. They're just too incompetent to do anything about it.
I was once at a large bank, and I was warned not to plug my laptop into the bank's network. At first I was thinking "this must be for security reasons, they clearly don't (and shouldn't) trust some random consultant's laptop on their network", but then I was told that it was for my own protection. Apparently the bank network was so lousy with viruses that a laptop without the latest patches would last only minutes before it was rooted. I keep my work laptop patched, so I did plug in. I ran Wireshark for a few minutes, which detected about a dozen hack attempts on my machine. On top of this, many of their servers were running ancient versions of windows, many at RTM patch levels. I suspect they were all infected, but I didn't have a chance to look into it.
It's not just one or two financial institutions, from what I gather, many of the larger ones have infections.
This is what excessive bureaucracy does to IT: the amount of paper work required to approve a patch is so onerous that IT managers simply don't patch servers. The paper work is meant to prevent the minor problem of 'unapproved' patches causing disruptions, but the end result is even worse, which is unpatched machines with rampant infections.