Be prepared for any rootkit that might get into your Windows 7 system

Posted on March 12th, 2011 in Windows 7 | No Comments »

When you are dealing with most malware, you pretty much know how they are going to act on your system. Even the worse of them seem to follow a pretty steady pattern that will help you to get rid of them. But there is one piece of malware that even security researchers hate to hear the name of. When you know that you have one of these on the system, it is going to be a long day of trying to get it out. The piece of malware that we are talking about is known as a Rootkit and it is one of the most damaging pieces of malware out on the internet right now. We will go over the basics of what a rootkit is and look at what kind of damage it can do to your system.  We will also look at the tools that you need to do to get it off of your system.

What is a rootkit?

A rootkit is program that is able to get into the kernel level of our system which means that it is able to hide from scanning programs that is on your computer. For those programs to be able to sniff it out they need to be at kernel level as well. For the people who might not know, the kernel level of the computer is the part where a lot of the sensitive things that your computer can do, happens. It is basically the part of the operating system that communicates with the hardware of the machine. You do not want user level access programs to communicate with the hardware directly so the kernel is the break off point. While we know a lot more about rootkits now than we did before, they can still be a pain to get rid of off of your system.

The damage that it can do

A rootkit, once it is in your system, can give the attacker unlimited power over your computer. They are able to assume the rights as a power user and they will have the same administrative rights that you have, maybe even more. This is because they are able to access the kernel. This is the main objective for any attacker that is trying to get into someone’s system. When an attacker is able to get this deep, most of the time, they will turn your computer into a simple node. This means that anything illegal that they want to try and hide, they will do on your computer. This means that if someone is going to get into trouble, it will be you.

How can I get it off my system?

In the past it was very hard to get an infection like this off of your system. Formatting the system was the only way that you can get it off. Now there is plenty of software out on the market that will help you get the rootkit off of your system. Download one of these programs and hopefully you will be back to normal.

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