While rootkits can be nearly invisible, viruses are usually quite conspicuous. Not all rootkits work the same. Privacy Report vulnerability Contact security License agreements Modern Slavery Statement Cookies Accessibility Statement Do not sell my info All third party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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Help me choose a product See what Malwarebytes can do for you Get a free trial Our team is ready to help. Partners Explore Partnerships. Partner Success Story. Resources Resources Learn About Cybersecurity. Malwarebytes Labs — Blog. Business Resources. See Content. Malwarebytes Anti-Rootkit Beta Removes and repairs the latest rootkits and the damage they cause Download. In this section, we want to cover some of the more widespread rootkit families out there.
If you are unfortunate enough to get infected with a rootkit, chances are it will be one of these. This rootkit is responsible for the creation of the ZeroAccess botnet, which hogs your resources as it mines for bitcoins or it commits click fraud by spamming you with ads. At some point, security researchers estimated the ZeroAccess botnet contained million PCs. A large part of it but not all, unfortunately was taken down by Microsoft as well as other security companies and agencies.
While not as strong a threat as before, Variations of the ZeroAccess rootkit are still out there and actively used. At one point, the botnet based on the TDSS rootkit was thought to be the second biggest in the world.
Following some concerted law enforcement actions, several arrests were made and the botnet entered a period of decline. The malware code, however, is still out there, and actively used. Unlike the ZeroAccess rootkit, TDSS is after your personal data such as credit card data, online bank accounts, passwords, Social Security numbers, and so on. The rootkit behind Necurs, one of the biggest currently active botnets , is responsible with spreading massive amounts of Locky ransomware spam as well as the Dridex financial malware.
The Necurs rootkit protects other types of malware that enslave a PC to the botnet, thus making sure the infection cannot be removed. Rootkits may be troublesome and persistent, but in the end, they are just programs like many other types of malware.
Phishing is one of the most frequently used methods to infect people with malware. The malicious hackers simply spam a huge email list with messages designed to trick you into clicking a link or opening an attachment. The fake message can be anything really, from a Nigerian prince asking for help to retrieve his gold, to really well-crafted ones such as fake messages from Google that request you update your login information. The attachment can be anything, such as a Word or Excel document , a regular.
Outdated software is one of the biggest sources of malware infection. Like any human creation, software programs are imperfect by design, meaning they come with many bugs and vulnerabilities that allow a malicious hacker to exploit them.
For this reason, keeping your software up-to-date at all times is one of the best things you can do to stay safe on the Internet and prevent a malicious hacker from infecting you with malware. Since updating your software can be such a chore, we recommend you use an automated program to do that for you. One major flaw of antivirus is that the malware has to effectively touch your PC before it becomes useful.
Traffic filtering software, on the other hand, scans your inbound and outbound traffic to make sure no malware program is about to come to land on your PC as well as prevent private and confidential information from leaking to any suspicious receivers.
Rootkits are some of the most complex and persistent types of malware threats out there. We stopped short of saying this, but if not even a BIOS flash is able to remove the rootkit, then you just might have to throw away that PC and just see which hardware components, if any, you can reuse.
Like with anything in life, the best treatment to a rootkit infection is to prevent one from happening. Last edited by Vladimir Unterfingher. So how are you supposed to decrypt that Partition in order to remove it? Has anyone found one method that works better than another for removal especially when it is advanced?
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