Windows Pre-Boot Malware Puts Financial Industry At Risk

Security researchers from FireEye discovered Windows pre-boot malware (or bootkit) on the machines of a customer from the financial transactions market. FireEye believes the malware belongs to a financial crime group from Russia, called FIN1.

“We identified the presence of a financially motivated threat group that we track as FIN1, whose activity at the organisation dated back several years,” FireEye reported. ”The threat group deployed numerous malicious files and utilities, all of which were part of a malware ecosystem referred to as ‘Nemesis’ by the malware developer(s).”

A “bootkit” can infect lower-level system components, which makes identifying it quite difficult. It’s also highly persistent and will not be removed by re-installing the Windows operating system. The malware supports a wide array of backdoors and capabilities, which include file transfer, screen capture, keystroke logging, process injection, process manipulation, and task scheduling support.

Once a target computer is infected with the Nemesis malware, it can be further updated to include more hacking tools and functionality. In early 2015, the FIN1 group updated Nemesis to include a utility that modifies the Volume Boot Record (VBR) and hijacks the system boot process to begin loading malware components before Windows system code. FireEye called this utility BOOTRASH.

BOOTRASH hijacks the boot system through a multi-step process, in which it creates a virtual file system in the unallocated drive space between partitions. It then hijacks the original VBR code with its own infected code. The malicious code then injects 32- or 64-bit versions of the Nemesis components into the Windows kernel.

The BOOTRASH installer will work with any drive that has a Master Boot Record (MBR) boot partition, but it will not work with the GUID Partition Table (GPT) disk architecture. It’s also unlikely that it will work with Windows machines that use Secure Boot, which is meant to protect against this type of bootkit and uses GPT as a requirement, as well.

Interestingly enough, the malware also needs the .NET 3.5 or later framework to work; otherwise, it will quit working. This seems like a considerable weakness in the portability of the malware. However, most Windows machines, especially from enterprise customers, should also have the .NET framework installed for use with other applications.

According to FireEye, bootkits aren’t that common, but there have been reports of such malware in the past. The bootkits have usually targeted the financial industry, but other industries have been affected as well. Their pre-boot persistence in enterprise computers makes them appealing to attackers. They also seem to be used when other techniques don’t work so well or when the targeted data is of high value.

FireEye suggested that re-installing the operating system is no longer a sufficient method of getting rid of certain types of malware. The solution against this type of threat is to use tools that can access and search raw disks at scale for evidence of bootkits, or the disks should be physically wiped before installing the operating system.

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Lucian Armasu joined Tom’s Hardware in early 2014. He writes news stories on mobile, chipsets, security, privacy, and anything else that might be of interest to him from the technology world. Outside of Tom’s Hardware, he dreams of becoming an entrepreneur.

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