Black Screen of Death Actually Caused by Malware
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A couple of days ago we wrote about the Black Screen of Death, a problem that caused Windows-based machines to freeze and lock out users, leaving them teary-eyed and black-screened.
The issue, however, doesn’t seem to be a common one, nor is it tied to Microsoft’s security updates, as we’d previously thought. In fact, UK security company Prevx, who pointed out the issue (and actually offered a software fix), admitted that the problem is likely caused by malware and not by Microsoft’s error.
Prevx’s CEO Mel Morris wrote a blog post, apologizing to Microsoft for the inconvenience. From the post:
“The issue appears to be related to a characteristic of the Windows Registry related to the storage of string data. In parsing the Shell value in the registry, Windows requires a null terminated ‘REG_SZ’ string. However, if malware or indeed any other program modifies the shell entry to not include null terminating characters, the shell will no longer load properly, resulting in the infamous Black Screen with the PC showing only the My Computer folder.”
The folks at Microsoft, understandably, aren’t happy. Chief Security Advisor of Microsoft EMEA Roger Halbheer fired at Prevx on his blog, saying:
“Looking at that, you should now make your risk assessment and decide which source you want to trust. For me, the ultimate source for information you should build your assessment on is neither Twitter (Twitter) nor your brother’s sister in law’s father’s brother (unless he works for Microsoft’s security) but our website.”
While this particular case was a false alarm, Halbheer forgets to point out that if we had listened exclusively to what Microsoft says when it comes to security issues in the past, we would have missed quite a lot of them. As always, don’t believe everything you read, see or hear, but also don’t immediately write off any news that doesn’t come from an official source.
http://mashable.com/2009/12/03/black-screen-of-death-malware/
http://www.prevx.com/blog/141/...s-Black-Screen-Root-Cause.html
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We apologize to Microsoft for any inconvenience our blog may have caused. This has been a challenging issue to identify. Users who have the black screen issue referred to can still safely use our free fix tool to restore their desktop icons and task bar.