Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Black Hat conference: Newest Stealth Rootkits

Filed under
Security

Just when anti-virus vendors think they have a bead on the threat from stealth rootkits, along comes word that a pair of researchers have discovered a new way to hide malicious programs.

Jamie Butler, director of engineering at HBGary Inc., and Sherri Sparks, a PhD student at the University of Central Florida, demonstrated the technique at the Black Hat Briefings here with a chilling warning that anti-virus scanners must "completely revamp" existing rootkit detection technologies.

The proof-of-concept, dubbed Shadow Walker, is a modification of Butler's FU rootkit, a kernel-level program capable of hiding processes and elevating process privileges. The rootkit uses DKOM (Direct Kernel Object Manipulation) to fake out the Windows Event Viewer to make forensics virtually impossible and can also hide device drivers, Butler explained.

With Shadow Walker, Butler and Sparks explore the idea of memory subversion to hide the rootkit in memory with almost no performance impact.

"This is a prototype for a fourth generation of rootkits that would defeat the current rootkit detection technology," said Sparks, who is renowned for her work around offensive/defensive malicious code technologies.

Some existing rootkit defense technologies use behavior detection, integrity detection and signature-based detection to find the stealth programs. Others, like Microsoft Corp.'s Strider Ghostbuster, F-Secure Corp.'s BlackLight and Sysinternals Freeware's RootkitRevealer, search for registry and file system API discrepancies that may indicate the presence of a user-mode or kernel-mode rootkit.

These guys are here showing us that we haven't even scratched the surface where rootkits are concerned.

Internet security practitioners in attendance described the Shadow Walker prototype as "scary."

Full Story.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.