Alureon Virus

If you have a virus on your machine, there is a very real risk you will get kicked off the internet on Monday.
Web-users are being warned to ensure their computers are clear of the nasty 'Alureon/DNS Changer bot'.
This piece of software found its way onto hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide late last year. The software was designed to re-direct you away from trusted websites, towards spoof websites in a bid to steal financial and personal information.

Alureon is a trojan and bootkit which is designed, amongst other things, to steal data by intercepting a system's network traffic and searching it for usernames, passwords and credit card data. According to research by Microsoft, Alureon was the second most active botnet in the second quarter of 2010.

The Alureon rootkit was first seen in 2006.PCs usually get infected by manually downloading and installing Trojan software, and has been seen bundled with the rogue security software Security Essentials 2010. When the dropper is executed, it first hijacks the print spooler service (spoolsv.exe) to write a filesystem at the end of the disk; it then infects low level system drivers such as those responsible for PATA operations (atapi.sys) to implement its rootkit. While Alureon has also been known to redirect search engines to commit click fraud, Google has taken steps to mitigate that for their users by detecting it and warning the user. Once installed, it blocks access to Windows Update and attempts to disable some anti-virus products.

The malware drew considerable public attention when a software bug in its code caused some 32-bit Windows systems to crash upon installation of security update MS10-015. The malware was using a hard-coded memory address in the kernel that changed after installation of the hotfix. Microsoft subsequently modified the hotfix to prevent installation if an Alureon infection is present. While the malware author also fixed the bug in his code.

In November 2010, the press reported that the rootkit has evolved to the point that it is able to bypass the mandatory kernel-mode driver signing requirement of 64-bit editions of Windows 7 by subverting the master boot record, something that also makes it particularly resistant on all systems to detection and removal by anti-virus software.

Prevention

• Enable a firewall on your computer.
• Get the latest computer updates for all your installed software.
• Use up-to-date antivirus software.
• Limit user privileges on the computer.
• Use caution when opening attachments and accepting file transfers.
• Use caution when clicking on links to web pages.
• Avoid downloading pirated software.
• Protect yourself against social engineering attacks.
• Use strong passwords.