“You’ve been infected with a rootkit.”  The chilling verdict is often delivered by cybersecurity experts on television drama series, but what does it actually mean?  Each year, systems around the world fall victim to this particularly insidious form of malicious software and fall under the control of attackers intent on jeopardizing the confidentiality, integrity and/or availability of sensitive information and systems.  What steps can security professionals take to deploy preventive and corrective tools designed to avoid and eradicate rootkit infections?

Rootkits vary in implementation but share a common characteristic: they all reach deep into the operating system and manipulate low-level functions to perform insidious actions.  The earliest rootkits sought to gain elevated system privileges while more recent rootkits focus on manipulating monitoring capabilities to avoid detection.  Whatever their intent, rootkits are extremely dangerous because of the low-level access they gain.

Read the full story: Rootkits Unearthed

Published October 26, 2015 in Certification Magazine