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

Fact or fiction?

[FishandChips]

Hmnn, this article is thin on facts and figures. And like so much "news" coming from the security industry, you're never really sure how much of it is fud and puffery in order to sell new products. Still, I guess things will continue to get worse so long as much of the IT industry plays pass the parcel, a shuffling process that always ends with the hit landing up on the poor old end-user, the person who is usually least qualified to deal with it.

I guess Bruce Schneier is right when he suggests that the way to improve some aspects of security, anyway, is by placing responsibility firmly on outfits like banks and ISPs who'll get smacked mightly hard in the wallet - by law, this time - unless they raise their game. That might put some pressure on OS-makers and their pals to design products that don't also need AV checkers that are dependent on signature libraries and prey to zero-day exploits.

Love the quote from a researcher saying that the alleged sale of rookits means that "there is a criminalisation of the virus world going on." As if it hasn't been criminal till now, just good clean fun ho ho.

Re:Misuse of the term

[Rich0]

I think at this point the burden of proof is on you to come up with a reference. I've personally always heard the term rootkit used in the manner used now by about three people who have replied to you, and as described on three different fairly-definitive websites referenced in this thread.

We can sit here all night posting back and forth "is not," "is too" but I don't think that we'll get any further. If you're so certain on your position please take 30 seconds and find something reasonably definitive to support your position.

Mods - before modding anything else in this thread please take the time to actually look up what a rootkit is... :)

For the record, an exploit is software designed to gain unauthorized access to a system. A rootkit is a set of tools used to maintain such access without the knowledge of the admin of the cracked system. Typically it includes modified ps, login/su/sshd, etc.

The whole idea of a rootkit is to make sure you can get back into the system a week later when the admin has patched the original vulnerability. If you rm the ps command it probably won't take long for the admin to figure out what happened.

The best way to detect a rootkit is via tripwire, run from a boot CD. There really isn't any way of defeating this method of detection, but it is very inconvenient since it requires brining the system offline for scanning. There are tools like rkhunter which search for rootkits on running systems, and in theory these can be defeated by a very clever rootkit.