Slashdot Mirror
Rootkit Creators Turn Professional
pete richards writes "Signalling a trend towards increased 'outsourcing' of some elements of malware creation, worm authors are increasingly turning to commercially available rootkits to help their creations slip past virus detection engines. Those root kits in the mean time are becoming more professional. Antivirus vendor F-Secure reported last week that it had detected a first rootkit designed to bypass detection by most of the modern rootkit detection engines."
If it's a known fact that this Golden Hacker Defender rootkit is publically sold, isn't it that much easier to catch the writers? Assuming there's a law against rootkits...
So here's what you do - write a worm and wrap it around a citrix or Windows Term Serv. Then when you have thousands, you can use then with DDOSs.
Seriously though - Golden Hacker Defender. I've never heard of this. It it were seriously a commercial product, I doubt it would be a rootkit, perhaps a "Remote administration tool." I can't goole (verb) where to purchase it.
So here's the thing. I wrote a virus, and now I'm going to sell it. It's a commercial virus. Oops! Not it isn't, it's just me selling a virus.
Move along, nothing to see here.
In other news, we learn that script kiddies don't actually write software.
What's with the "commercially available" business? From TFA:So you can buy it, so what - you can buy cocaine on street corners, does that make it 'commercially available'? Or are they simply heralding Rootkit 101 as the latest product to hit the v-scene? What's next, Virus Writers Monthly?
Come on, malware's been for sale for donkeys years, someone packaging something up and calling it a product doesn't change the nature of the beast.
> What kind of pleasure can be had from doing this kind of hacking? After a while, doesn't it just become old hat?
True, that's what happens to all industries while professionalizing. I guess it's similar to people willing to work in arms industry, so this doesn't just concern foreign governments.
Virus writers go by their own rules. The anti virus business has a reactionary approach. Unless the anti virus engines have the updated signatures they can't stop the virus from spreading.
Doesn't this again bring up the question which was discussed a while ago. 'Why should Operating systems have a policy of default accept? Run programs only which you trust.' Not that this will solve the problem in one shot but it will make the problem more manageable. By the way things are going and the speed with which new viruses are created, i guess the day is not far when we will need huge databases to store the signatures for the viruses on each machine.
A rootkit is a tool that helps worm authors to slip past malware detection tools. The rootkit is 'wrapped around' the virus, and hides its payload from detection engines. After the rootkit has penetrated a system's defences, the worm can start doing its work.
Wrong. A "rootkit" is a series of hacks to the underlying operating system, which make a running process harder to detect. In other words, a rootkit will keep your process from turning up in the Windows Task Manager, or a Linux "ps".
Definition from the Jargon File.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
You know, I'd like to see fewer "CRISIS! But wait! FooCorp can save you!" articles on Slashdot, and while we're at it, no dupes, and a pony.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Rootkits are not nessesarily bad. They have good purposes such as in the enterprise world to watch what you are doing/logging what you are doing without you being able to find and terminate that process. You have to remember everything has a level of good and can be turned bad in an instant.
:)
It is like a formatting tool, when used properly it deletes what you want but if someone wrote a program to access the formatting tool and run it on a drive that you wanted things on now it has just been turned into something bad.
There is a legitimate use to everything