Windows 7 Hacked in Seconds with a 3KB File

Windows 7, despite all the sophistication and rich services that millions are wondering about already, has that old bone of contention that Microsoft, surprisingly never took care of. When after a sluggish Windows Vista, we thought that Windows 7 may be the saviour, it can come as an anticlimax for Microsoft fanboys that Windows 7 was hacked from the boot process with only a 3 KB file by two researchers. If you are surprised, perplexed, out of your mind and ridiculing the whole truth, here is the catch, according to them,

There’s no fix for this. It cannot be fixed. It’s a design problem,

Welcome to good ol’ Microsoft my friend.

Researchers Vipin Kumar and Nitin Kumar used proof-of-concept code they developed, called VBootkit 2.0, to take control of a Windows 7 virtual machine while it was booting up.

Though techradar suggest that,

While VBootkit 2.0 shows how an attacker can take control of a Windows 7 computer, it’s not necessarily a serious threat. For the attack to work, an attacker must have physical access to the victim’s computer. The attack can not be done remotely.

Does that assure you?How many people in the world run a desktop computer (supposing you will run Windows 7 in that) for a single user?

Vipin Kumar also said,

VBootkit 2.0, which is just 3KB in size, allows an attacker to take control of the computer by making changes to Windows 7 files that are loaded into the system memory during the boot process. Since no files are changed on the hard disk, VBootkit 2.0 is very difficult to detect, he said.

Kumar and Kumar demonstrated an earlier version of VBootkit for Windows Vista at the Black Hat Europe conference.

If you are wondering what this software can do, here are two cents for you.

1. the software allows an attacker to increase their user privileges to system level, the highest possible level.
2. You can delete and modify a user’s password from his account and give it to someone else and subsequently play with his personal settings.

This is how secure Windows 7 is. Good luck.

[Information source: techradar.com]