Mailinglist Archive

0wning Vista from the boot
By Federico Biancuzzi

Federico Biancuzzi interviews Nitin and Vipin Kumar, authors of
VBootkit, a rootkit that is able to load from Windows Vista
boot-sectors. They discuss the "features" of their code, the support of
the various versions of Vista, the possibility to place it inside the
BIOS (it needs around 1500 bytes), and the chance to use it to bypass
Vista's product activation or avoid DRM.

http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/442


[Side Note: Ok, is anyone surprised that another Microsoft OS was owned
in short order?  Vista looks to be the best potentially secure MS OS
since, well, since forever.  But Vista also has some problems in
usability that seem to be enough to make users disable a lot of the
security features.  Oh, and just to be clear, I am not ragging on MS.
The previous post about Mac OS X and many of the known Linux
vulnerabilities are just as much of an issue.  You just have a much
better chance of getting things fixed BEFORE being owned with Open
Source.  -  jjk]