What A Rootkit Is And Why You Should Care
Unless you've been out to sea lately Sony has been caught for the second time stealthily installing rootkits on their devices at the expense of unsuspecting consumers. In 2005 the company was caught when it was found out that it was installing the rootkit on their music CDs. This time around the rootkit was found on their MicroVault USM-F line of USB drives. The reason for Sony's actions come from wanting to control and protect copyrighted content. But rootkits can present a very real threat to a consumer's computer and their personal information.
What is a rootkit? It's a program that is specifically designed to hide itself from anti-virus, spyware and malware programs. Some rootkits are benign but most of them, especially the ones you hear about from Sony are not. Rootkits these days are often very malicious. A rootkit enables someone to remotely control and attack your computer. They can change, delete or add files to your system and use your system as a back door for installing all sorts of nasty things like viruses. Once a it's installed anyone who knows to look for the rootkit software can snoop around on your system, track what you do online or gain access to administrative privileges on your computer. Rootkits often bury themselves so deeply in your system, such as the registry for instance, that usually the only way to get rid of them is wiping the hard drive clean and re-installing the OS. Sometimes programs like Rootkit Revealer are successful at finding certain kinds of rootkits it can't reveal all of them.
There are different kinds of rootkits. Some, called Kernel level rootkits add or change code in the kernel to hide back doors in the system. This makes it easy for Trojan Horses to slip in. Some rootkits act as drivers and install themselves as such on to the system. Virtual rootkits can change the computer's boot sequence and then load themselves through the machine's memory. From there it can intercept any communication made by the operating system. Application level rootkits can replace normal application binaries with fakes and they can also change the behavior of the current applications on the system.
Either way it's a good idea to not use your computer blindly. A tremendous amount of damage can be done to a person's system once it's infested with a malicious rootkit. The time and skill needed to extract one from the system is not worth it. It's best to prevent these programs from installing on your system by keeping your OS up to date, not downloading from suspect sites and don't allow software from peripherals, DVDs or CDs to install without thoroughly reading the terms of agreement. If the agreement doesn't sound right don't allow it to install! It isn't always necessary to install ready made software on the device to use the device on your computer. Look for an open source alternative. A trusted site to find open source software is SourceForge.net. Pay attention to technology news and keep an eye on companies that try to get away with installing these kinds of things on their products. If you suspect or know that one is running on your system, remove all of your important data to a back-up disc or hard drive, wipe your system clean and re-in stall your OS. Remember, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure!
By : Victoria Jeffrey
Keyword : What A Rootkit Is And Why You Should Care
