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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."
Rootkits should be GPL.
At the very least they should be GNU/Rootkits.
Somebody contact the EFF or like start throwing chairs or something.
liqbase
def n.: Rootkit:
:)
When an Australian male carries a few spare condoms with him on a night out.
Ahhh.. maybe I shouldnt have bothered..
-- Jim.
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
One company in Redmond has made billions from selling rootkits.
...and one flew over the cuckoo's nest.
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.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
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
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.
Help I'm a rock.
So now we can wait for the AV vendors to come up with a rootkit detector detector detector..
Take life easy: one bit at a time.