Anti Rootkit Blog

There is an interesting article over at Astalavista about how new Intel based machines will have rootkit functionality “available” to the user. This will surely turn out to be another avenue to be utilised by malware writers.

From the article…
“Essentially, all new Intel machines (and a number of current Intel servers)
come with free hardware rootkit functionality, which is operational and
accessible when the machine is powered off, and in the case of laptops, even
when they are unplugged and powered off.

There is the mention of code signing, TLS and PKI magic to allay your security
concerns however…”

Read the full article here…

Keep Safe,

regards

Steo

Intel recently released a document which shows that they are developing technology that will thwart malacious code from executing in the core processor area which rootkits are known to use. This is a first for the industry and it shows that rootkits are a major worry for the larger corporations and they are putting a lot of effort into overcoming what is becoming a scourge on computer users worldwide.The technology basically consists of an integrated chip on the computer motherboard which will protect key areas of the processor from use by users and thus away from rootkit users.

In a nutshell, a quote from the Intel Research article…

“This firmware-based approach, called System Integrity Services (SIS), makes use of a true, isolated execution environment, as well as sophisticated integrity checks and forgery-protected, execution-presence verification, to detect attacks that circumvent, tamper with, or disable critical software agents running on a host computing system.”

Intel hope to have this system available to end users in either 2008 or 2009. There is a bit go yet but it is in the right direction.

Keep Safe

regards
Steo
www.antirootkit.com