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McAfee Labs :

McAfee Labs Goes After Evil Maid

Monday, October 26, 2009 at 4:11am by Aditya Kapoor and Rachit Mathur
Aditya Kapoor

In her recent blog Joanna Rutkowska describes a proof-of-concept code to attack Truecrypt system disk encryption. The blog also mentions “the concept behind the Evil Maid Attack is neither new, nor l33t in any way.” However, because the POC is now published, we expect script kiddies to jump on this opportunity and tweak this code to their advantage.

As always, to protect our customers we looked into a possible AV detection mechanism to alert users in case the system is compromised. Obviously an AV cannot prevent an Evil Maid attack, but alerting a user on the first reboot after such an infection can go a long way in preventing data loss.

We now detect this proof-of-concept code as Trojan PWS-EvilMaid!demo, due to its password-stealing capabilities. We will watch for any future variants that follow this trend. Here is the screenshot of McAfee alerting the user once the machine is infected. We recommend you reinstall Truecrypt if you see this detection.

EvilMaid Detection

Protect what you value!

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Comments (1)

  • DedRyzing October 26, 2009 4:42AM

    So if this attack is “neither new, nor l33t in any way”, why did it take the public publishing of POC code for McAfee to take any action to mitigate the affect, instead of sitting on their hands?

    Reply