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Rootkits the new weapon for cyber criminals |
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Wednesday, 11 July 2007 |
  Current-day cyber-criminals work for financial gain, usually by developing software for third parties.
Regardless of the final objective -stealing confidential information or crashing systems- the basic requirement for targeted attacks to be successful is to go unnoticed. That's the reason behind the enormous increase in malware* using rootkit techniques.
Rootkits in themselves are not malicious. However, they have become the perfect weapon for cyber-crime due to their capacity to go unnoticed by security solutions (they hide as kernel modules and low level hooks, and by patching undocumented operating system functions).
Common myths
Contrary to popular belief, rootkits can be detected and it's also false that there is nothing that your company can do to protect itself from them and the programs they hide (tailor-made to act remotely).
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Security information 