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New Alureon Rootkit Takes Malware To New Level
Trailrunner7 writes "A new version of the venerable Alureon malware has appeared, and this one includes some odd behavior designed to prevent analysis and detection by antimalware systems. However, this isn't the typical evasion algorithm, as it uses some unusual encryption and decryption routines to make life much more difficult for analysts and users whose machines have been infected. Alureon is a well-known and oft-researched malware family that has some rootkit-like capabilities in some of its variations. The newest version of the malware exhibits some behavior that researchers haven't seen before and which make it more problematic for antimalware software to detect it and for experts to break down its components."
Malicious software can still be malicious while in memory, send spam, botnet etc. A running exploit of a readonly system is just as compromised as a running writable one, until you turn it off of course. You would never be able to patch it unless you patch the ROM or receive memory patches.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Summary says: "The newest version of the malware exhibits some behavior that researchers haven't seen before"
The article says: "In 1999, a new virus, Win32/Crypto, was discovered... Today, in 2011, variants of Win32/Alureon are bringing this old-school technique back to life... Another interesting tidbit is that an initial version of this obfuscator first arrived in our lab in the first half of 2009."
That's kinda stretching the definition of "haven't seen before", which may be true in a technical sense (because they haven't seen THIS EXACT MALWARE before, but they've certainly seen lots like it).
"We're closely monitoring Alureon to ensure that our users are always protected. In fact, Alureon has been part of the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) since April 2007."
I am putting my full faith and hope in to the Microsoft security team to eliminate it with their latest Malicious Software Removal tool.
I have given up on being paranoid about viruses, and I am much happier now!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Only for major major updates, and it wasn't a pain in the ass. You unplugged the chip and stuck the new one in. Back then it was pretty common for users to hack their Amigas anyways, so it wasn't that big of a deal to open her up and swap it in. The pain the ass was expanding the chip memory by soldering lines to a new socket. I was 12 when I had to do this for my Amiga 500. Worked fine.
A floppy drive is easy - a floppy drive is just some motors in a cage - the floppy controller resides o nthe motherboard and tells those motors how to operate. The write protect switch can easily disable the floppy drive's write amplifier.
Something like a hard drive is hard - you can't disable the read/write line to the (PATA) drive, because you have to write to the registers in order for it to work. It's why forensic labs have drive write blockers - they pass through everything except the write commands - these things require intelligence in order to perform their tasks.
Ditto USB drives - you can't disable writing to the NAND flash chips itself, because you have to write to them in order to read from them (as well as do things like identify the capacity and such), so the controller has to have intelligence to handle ignoring write commands from the USB host (and even then some drives still do wear levelling and garbage collection on the raw media - so you need lots of firmware hooks to disable that, too).
The problem is, there's no way to physically make it impossible to write. Some flash chips it was possible - you protected it by disabling the high-voltage programming power source - without that voltage, programming would be problematic. But these days, the charge circuits to do that are built into the silicon so the manufacturers don't have to spend the extra dollar on external power supply circuits and PCB routing, because the intent for writable nonvolatile memory was being able to write to them.
Making a write-protect switch these days is difficult and often requires extra circuits in order to have the necessary intelligence to block write commands and not all writes (which disables normal read operations as well).