Hacker Defeats Hardware-based Rootkit Detection

Manequintet writes "Joanna Rutkowska's latest bit of rootkit-related research shatters the myth that hardware-based (PCI cards or FireWire bus) RAM acquisition is the most reliable and secure way to do forensics. At this year's Black Hat Federal conference, she demonstrated three different attacks against AMD64 based systems, showing how the image of volatile memory (RAM) can be made different from the real contents of the physical memory as seen by the CPU. The overall problem, Rutkowska explained, is the design of the system that makes it impossible to reliably read memory from computers. "Maybe we should rethink the design of our computer systems so they they are somehow verifiable," she said."

Comments

Re:she shatters two myths really ...

[rajafarian]

1) that hardware based rootkit detection is unreliable and
2) that a beautiful girl cannot be a part of the geeky world of cyber security research (considered exclusively a part of male fiefdom).

That reminds me of when I was studying Physics at a small state college, the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater... The physics department was quite small and almost every Physics student knew every other Physics student, and we all knew one thing: there were no girls in Physics, well, there was one but she was quite ugly (but she was real nice).

Anyway, one day it was the first day of Physics and this really HOT blonde rushed in and as she sat way in the back our Physics teacher said, "Excuse me, miss, I think you're in the wrong class room." We all knew that was the case but were hoping it wasn't. She asked if it some other class, the teacher said, "No." After she had walked out the door the whole class, all half dozen or so of us, burst out laughing so loudly that you could probably have heard us laughing in any other classroom in that floor. Now that I think about it, it might have been crying masqueraded as laughing.

True story. Off-topic? So sue me.

Nah.

[antdude]

I diasagree on the cute part. She doesn't look cute and that attractive to me even after doing a Google image search.