McAfee Free Tool To Get Rid of PinkSlipBot Remnants

PinkSlipBot is a harmful trojan that runs in the background and targets specific industries like banking, financial institution and more. First identified in 2007, the virus was created to steal the confidential information, including the location, organization as well as the owner name of the infected system. This enables the attacker to sell this info to some other party and earn money by deploying the targeted malware to the system.

Once your computer system gets infected with this hazardous virus, you will receive many pop-ups asking you to download malicious programs and files to your computer systems. The victim’s computer is controlled through a command-based backdoor, functioned by the control server along with a virtual network computing–based backdoor. The malware is also tracked under three other names, i.e. Qakbot, PinkSlip andQbot.

The virus can be distributed to the other computer system shares the same network. It can also update its latest  version automatically through the control server. To secure your system from this virus, McAfee  Antivirus has launched a new tool named AmIPinkC2, which can be downloaded for free. This tool is a Windows command-line application that completely take away the leftovers of PinkSlipBotthat permits the virus to continue to access previously attacked computer systems as proxy relays, even if the virus has been removed from the system. 

With the deep research and study, McAfee has tracked PinkSlipBot campaigns and presented the complete analysis at the Virus Bulletin Security Conference held in 2016. From the past campaigns as well as activities of PinkSlipBot malware, they have discovered that besides stealing the confidential information and data, this banking trojan makes the use of affected hosts as a proxy server to pass on the information from central control server to other infected hosts, resulting in a mesh type network creation.  

What Makes McAfee’s Free Tool Different From Other Security Tools?

Besides the availability of many other tools that let the user get rid of this hazardous malware and enable their computer system to operate normally, McAfee has made its presence as a leader by enabling its tool to completely remove the leftovers from the infected system. All the other security software and tools were only focusing on removing the malware’s binary files causing the Trojan’s capacity to steal the passwords from the affected computer system. 

McAfee’s new tool will completely remove the remaining files of the PinkSlipBot malware making it impossible for the virus to pass on relay C&C commands as well as hide the exfiltration of stolen information via a mesh of proxies. 

System Specifications

To use this tool, a computer must be running Windows XP or higher along with a hi-speed internet connection. Once you download the tool from McAfee’s website, open command prompt window (Windows + R) and execute the program without using any parameter. Simply type C:\>AmIPinkC2.exeto run this tool in Detect Mode, which will find the PinkSlipBot leftovers on your system. Remove it by following the further instructions and make your work smooth and hassle-free.

Maria Silvia is an experienced writer who loves to study and write about the latest software, critical online threats and way to deal with them.