Poweliks: persistent malware without a file (blog.gdatasoftware.com)

I was pretty meh about this until I got to the part about how the registry key is hidden and encoded. wow.

The term "persistent malware" does not seem applicable in this case; the infection resides in the Windows Registry, so simply restoring a disk image or reinstalling Windows (among other approaches) will remove it. "Persistent malware" seems more appropriate to infections that reside in places like the GPU: http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/09/26/2024236/malware-now-hi...