The latest installment of OS from Microsoft as you know is Windows 7, whose RC1 is yet to be released for masses on 30th April, i.e 3 days from now. Eventhough two Indian researchers, Vipin and Nitin Kumar claim to have successfully hacked Windows 7. They have designed a piece of software weighing just 3kb(wow!), that attacks what is claimed to be a ‘design problem’ of the OS. Their software is name Vbootkit 2.0 and it can actually allow the attacker to gain complete control of the exploited system. Also the researchers claim that it is an non-fixable change, well that sure is going to give M$ a chase for their new baby.

VBootkit's working

How does it work? During boot up, VBootKit 2.0 , loads itself into the system memory and bypasses the hard drive altogether, making it extremely difficult to detect as nothing is altered on the hard disk. And once it is is up in the memory, it functions just like a remote backdoor that allows the attacker to do any changes including changing system passwords, install other malwares etc. But, as it runs in memory it will last as long as PC runs, once it is restarted its gone. Also, you dont need to worry much as the attacker needs to have physical access to your machine to use this software. But Microsoft has definitely got some reasons to get worried, if their so called “best designed” OS can be taken over by a 3KB code. You might have noticed somethind, the version of this software, its 2.0 , and thats because they made a similar code for Vista too! Why dont OS makers learn from it?Well, we do learn and hence using Linux is a wise decision . Look out for my next post to get what I mean to say.