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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A kernel-level driver for old PC motherboards has been abused by criminals to hijack Windows computers, disable antivirus, and hold files to ransom.

Sophos this month reported that an arbitrary read-write flaw in a digitally signed driver for now-deprecated Gigabyte hardware was recently used by ransomware, dubbed Robbinhood, to quietly switch off security safeguards on Windows 7, 8 and 10 machines.

The problem, said Sophos, is that while Gigabyte stopped supporting and shipping the driver a while back, the software's cryptographic signature is still valid. And so, when the ransomware infects a computer – either by some other exploit or by tricking a victim into running it – and loads the driver, the operating system and antivirus packages will allow it because the driver appears legit.

At that point, the ransomware exploits the security flaw in the Gigabyte driver to alter memory to bypass protection mechanisms and inject malicious code into kernel space, completely compromising the box and allowing the file-scrambling component to run unhindered.

Also at: threatpost.

If only they used their powers for good.

Original Submission