Malware: Fighting Malicious Code

Windows User-Mode RootKits

For many years, user-mode RootKits were focused primarily on UNIX systems. With these origins, it's not an accident that the word root (the superuser account of UNIX) is prominently featured in the word RootKit. They may have been born and grown up on UNIX, but user-mode RootKit techniques have been adapted to other platforms as well, especially over the past few years. In particular, there are a handful of interesting user-mode RootKits for Windows machines, which we'll discuss in this section. Like their UNIX counterparts, user-mode RootKits on Windows modify critical operating system software to allow an attacker to gain access to and hide on a machine. Note that we're still focused on user-mode RootKits (which, ...