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."

Comments

Misuse of the term

[$RANDOMLUSER]

From TFA:

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.

Re:Easy prey?

[prichardson]

There probably isn't a law against rootkits, and there shouldn't be. There should be a law against using them to break into systems that you are not authorized to enter, and there is a law against that.

A law against rootkits would be very problematic. Is VNC a rootkit? If there's a bug in SSH that is exploitable to gain root access I bet it would suddenly fall under the domain of being labeled a rootkit by any law banning them, should the mainatainers of SSH be prosecuted because of that?

It really comes down to liberty though. If I want to hack my own computer I should be allowed to do so. If I want to write a virus I should be allowed to do so, but I should not be allowed to release it into the wild.