December '10 Patch Tuesday: MSRT Now Detects Qakbot
Qakbot is a nasty piece of software composed of a keylogger, a password-stealer and user-mode rootkit. If you are unlucky enough to catch this piece of malware, you can expect it to steal anything it can get its hands on. It will steal login info and passwords, banking info user keystrokes, and other things of the sort. It will then upload all the information it gathers to a remote server via FTP.
If that isn’t enough, Qakbot can also update itself and thus ensure it’s always running a recent version of the malware. As of this month Qakbot should no longer be a problem for Windows users.
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That’s because Redmond-based software giant Microsoft added Quackbot detection capabilities to its virus removal tool MSRT (Malicious Software Removal Tool). As part of the December 2010 Patch Tuesday, the MSRT team has added the Win32/Qakbot family of backdoors to its detections.
As part of the December 2010 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft rolled out a total of 17 security bulletins – 1 moderate, 14 important and 2 critical. Microsoft employs a 4-tier rating system: low, moderate, important, and critical. The moderate rating refers to vulnerabilities whose exploitability can be mitigated to a significant degree by factors such as default configuration, auditing, or difficulty of exploitation. The important rating refers to vulnerabilities whose exploitation could result in compromise of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of users data, or of the integrity or availability of processing resources. The critical rating refers to vulnerabilities whose exploitation could allow the propagation of an Internet worm without user action.
The 17 aforementioned bulletins addressed a total of 40 vulnerabilities that plague the Windows operating system, the Office productivity suite, the Internet Explorer web browser, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Exchange.
Detailed information on the 17 bulletins Microsoft rolled out this December is available here. An analysis of the 17 bulletins is available here.
Qakbot is a nasty piece of software composed of a keylogger, a password-stealer and user-mode rootkit. If you are unlucky enough to catch this piece of malware, you can expect it to steal anything it can get its hands on. It will steal login info and passwords, banking info user keystrokes, and other things of the sort. It will then upload all the information it gathers to a remote server via FTP. 