Removing files which "just won't go away"

A standard way to remove many forms of malware is to remove the registry entry which autoruns them. For example, you might have an entry called windows auto update in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run with a value of Activexdebugger32.exe. Once you've determined this executable to be malware, you delete this registry entry, kill the process, delete the executable, and you're done.

But hold on... just refresh the view of HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and check that the entry really disappeared. If it didn't, you have some form of self-protecting malware. It could be a real rootkit, a pseudo-rootkit, or just a couple of buddy processes which look after each others' backs.

I won't go into the world of rootkits very far here, except to say that I've yet to see a single example in the flesh of what I would call a real rootkit - that is, one which runs before the OS loader and controls everything. All the ones we've had to deal with on our site are pseudo-rootkits, with the "cloaking" - intercepting API calls and returning fake information to make it look as if the malware isn't there - being done by a boot-time service.

The "buddy processes" which I mentioned might take the form of two or more standard processes, or perhaps a standard malware process plus a DLL loaded at boot (or logon) time, for example via HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify. These processes form a kind of "Whack-a-Mole" game; if you kill one, its buddy pops up another. Killing both simultaneously is hard, and killing Winlogon is generally not a good idea anyway.

Anyway, let's say that you have a file like %SystemRoot%\System32\NTOS.EXE which you can't delete or rename, or that you've used Rootkit Revealer and found a pseudo-rootkit using a driver/service file called %SystemRoot%\System32\drivers\ynhqttqd.sys which you can't even see. You have a couple of choices to get rid of them.

You could boot a different OS copy: from a CD, a memory stick, a separate hard disk partition, a separate hard disk altogether (maybe take the infected PC's disk to a different PC), or even MS-DOS 7.0 from diskette with NTFSDOS Pro, depending on how macho you are. Then go in while the system is under "general anaesthetic" and delete the offending files. You can clean up the registry entries which run the malware once you've rebooted.

If you can't do that - notably, if the PC is "far" away, defined as "further than you're prepared to walk", or if the PC can't be rebooted until midnight and you don't want to be around then - you can have Windows rename the files for you at the next reboot. To do this, we're going to use a registry value which is also used by software installation and patch operations, called PendingFileRenameOperations, which lives in the key HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager. This is a value whose type is REG_MULTI_SZ, which for our purposes means "a list of strings".

Each element of PendingFileRenameOperations consists of a pair of strings. The first is a full path name to a file, with a bit of magic at the start of it; the second is the name name and extension (only) for the file. Here's a sample REGINI file:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager
    PendingFileRenameOperations = REG_MULTI_SZ \
        "\??\C:\WINDOWS\System32\ntos.exe" "ntos.exe_x" \
        "\??\C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\ynhqttqd.sys" "ynhqttqd.sys_x" \


I have no idea what the backslash and two question marks are for at the start of the full path name, but I suggest you leave them in. The backslashes at the end of each line say "we're not done yet" (there's a blank line at the end of the file to say "now we are"). If you use a different command-line tool (other than REGINI) to edit your registry, adjust the syntax appropriately.

Now, when you apply this registry change and reboot, Windows will perform the equivalent of the following good old-fashioned DOS boxcommand prompt commands:

REN "C:\WINDOWS\System32\ntos.exe" "ntos.exe_x"
REN "C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\ynhqttqd.sys" "ynhqttqd.sys_x"

Because this happens really early in the boot process, it's more or less guaranteed to work. (Only a "true" rootkit, running under the OS loader, would prevent it, I think.) About the only thing that might go wrong is if the target filename already exists, which can happen if you didn't clean up after a previous attack. So your first task whern the PC reboots is to delete the various .EXE_X and .SYS_X files.

Protecting your memory stick

If, for some petty corporate reason like "they don't allow me to change the registry", you can't apply the little hack I wrote about on 23 October, then you can at least protect your memory stick itself. This is also useful if you're lending your stick out to someone who will use it in more than one PC and don't want them catching, then transferring viruses (and blaming you, loudly, to their hosts).

All you do is open the memory stick and create a new folder called AUTORUN.INF. This should prevent most worms/viruses from creating a file of the same name, because when the worm sets out to create this file, it will probably use Windows file system calls which either delete, or truncate to zero, any existing regular file with that name; but those calls don't work for folders. (Of course, now I've blown the secret, I expect the virus writers will add code to do just that. So keep this one to yourself...)

Memory stick worms

Lately, we've been seeing a lot of worms, and even some genuine viruses (*), coming into our network via USB memory sticks (aka "pen drives"). For those of us who remember the first MS-DOS viruses, which spread almost exclusively via diskette, it's rather nostalgic.

The culprit, of course, is Microsoft's desire to make things "simple" - meaning "automatic" - for Joe Sixpack; there's a fundamental incompatibility between a home entertainment system, which Windows has become, and an operating system for getting work done. (Here's a rule of thumb for you: any time you see stuff which starts without the user asking it to, look for malware to pop up in short order.)

These worms pretty much all reproduce the same way, at least in terms of how they jump to and from PCs. They have an AUTORUN.INF file and an executable of some kind. When you put the stick in the PC, Windows finds AUTORUN.INF "automagically". You can find documentation of some of the possible things which this file can do, but basically, the worm version will either run the executable immediately, or modify the Windows Explorer default behaviour so that the worm will run as soon as you open the stick by double-clicking on it. The executable will make a copy of itself and AUTORUN.INF on all the disk partitions and shared drive connections which it can see, and then open the root folder normally. (This takes a fraction of a second, but you won't notice it.) The executable will then sit around in memory and every time you insert a removable storage volume (such as another memory stick) or map a network drive, it will copy the worm "kit" to it.

Sometimes the executable will live in a fake \RECYCLED folder, which is quite clever because hardly anyone ever opens the recycle bin on a memory stick, and because the folder doesn't contain a real recycle bin structure, the worm will be safe, even if you empty the bin while the stick is in the drive.

Now, in theory you can prevent certain drive types from executing the contents of their AUTORUN.INF files using a registry value (NoDriveTypeAutoRun). But this is hard to do in practice. First, it's a per-user key, which in a corporate environment is harder to manipulate reliably than a per-PC key. Secondly, there are several bugs known for it. And thirdly, a little-known registry key called MountPoints2 contains cached information about every memory stick or other removable device which your PC has ever seen, and that overrides the NoDriveTypeAutoRun value if you insert a volume which the PC already knows about.

The only solution I could find from Microsoft is typically light and nimble: prevent all USB storage from running. This is fine if the aim is to stop people using memory sticks altogether, but didn't you just have a 4GB stick custom-printed for everyone in the company, and tell them to make their own backups on it?

Anyway, there seems to be a solution: a one-shot, quick way to prevent AUTORUN.INF files from being used on a PC, from any medium. My colleague and fellow low-budget Windows hacker Emin Atac thought up the idea, and I spent all of 15 minutes testing it. Now it's your turn (well, "the world is our beta site" works well enough as a corporate mantra for Microsoft).

All you do is to copy these three lines into a file called NOAUTRUN.REG (or anything.REG) and double-click it. Corporate network people can transform it into a script for their favourite command-line registry manipulator, or maybe make it a system policy thingy.

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\Autorun.inf]
@="@SYS:DoesNotExist"
This hack tells Windows to treat AUTORUN.INF as if it were a configuration file from a pre-Windows 95 application. IniFileMapping is a key which tells Windows how to handle the .INI files which those applications typically used to store their configuration data (before the registry existed). In this case it says "whenever you have to handle a file called AUTORUN.INF, don't use the values from the file. You'll find alternative values at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\DoesNotExist." And since that key, er, does not exist, it's as if AUTORUN.INF is completely empty, and so nothing autoruns, and nothing is added to the Explorer double-click action. Result: worms cannot get in - unless you start double-clicking executables to see what they do, in which case, you deserve to have your PC infected.

The only downside of this is that if you insert a CD with software on it, you have to explore it by hand to find the setup program. Of course, if that means your kids install less software, that could also be considered an upside.

If you want to check that the registry settings of this hack are in place, open Regedit, walk down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping, and you should see something like this:

(*) If you don't know the difference, Wikipedia is (probably) your friend.