For all you nerds out there I’m not referring to the Star Trek movie, instead this is about a new type of bootkit malware which will hide itself in the Master Boot Record or empty space between partitions. Apparently it’s been around since the beginning of the year and a friend of mine was the one who brought it to my attention.
This one can be pretty bad folks, since it’s a malware that loads before Windows does, it can be virtually undetectable. Not only that but simply formatting and reinstalling won’t get rid of it either, you’ll need to completely blow out everything on the hard drive in order to remove this sucker.
Not only is it virtually undetectable but since it has full reign over the operating system it can do anything it wants to like transferring files, process manipulation, task scheduling or even capturing screen and keystrokes.
If your hardware is newer and you are running one of the newer versions of Windows like 8 or 10 then it’s more than likely you have secureboot, which you should make sure is enabled. This is a feature inside the BIOS that could prevent such malware from getting installed and provides an extra level of security.
If you’ve been contemplating on getting a new computer or if your hardware supports it and you’ve been debating on upgrading to Windows 10 from Windows 7 this could be some fairly good incentive to do so…