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A bootkit is a particular type of rootkit which kicks in when the computer boots and before any operating system has loaded. This can make it even more dangerous because it has full access to the system and cannot be removed by merely inspecting the operating system’s list of start-up services.
Austrian hacker Peter Kleissner has released the world’s first ever open source bootkit framework called Stoned Bootkit, named in dubious honour of an early boot sector computer virus called “Stoned.”
Stoned Bootkit aims to attack all versions of Microsoft Windows from XP through to the brand new Windows 7, including Server releases. Stoned loads before Windows starts and remains in memory, and comes with its own file system drivers, a plug-in engine and a collection of Windows “pwning” tools.
Stoned Bootkit also claims to be the first bootkit that breaks TrueCrypt encryption as well as working with traditional FAT and NTFS disk volumes.
This means with Stoned you can install any software you choose – a Trojan horse, say – onto any computer running Windows. You do not need know any passwords and it does not matter if the file system is encrypted.
Stoned was unveiled at the Blackhat USA security conference and Kleissner’s PowerPoint presentation is available online.
In a slide entitled “Who am I?” Kleissner describes himself as an independent operating system developer, a professional software engineer and malware analyst.
The source code for the Stoned Bootkit, as well as general research and technical detail, is available on its own web site. Here you can inspect how it works as well as read instructions on making your own Stoned infector Live CD – making it tragically simple to infect computers provided you can get physical access.
For those needing more help, SecurityTube has posted a video online showing a computer being infected with Stoned and then disinfected again.
Kleissner suggests this is a useful application for law enforcement officials but I suspect there may be somewhat less scrupulous individuals who will find other uses for it.
As with such open source luminaries like WireShark, a plug-in architecture permits developers world-wide to extend the range of functions Stoned can perform. The similarities end there, with WireShark being an intrusion detection system, not an intrusion enabler.
