Mac OS X gets rootkit cod­ing manual

July 21st, 2009 by Ryan Huff Leave a reply »

Over the past decade, the world has seen advances in rootk­its run­ning on Win­dows and Unix oper­at­ing sys­tems that few would have thought pos­si­ble. Now, it’s Mac OS X’s turn, as a secu­rity researcher plans to share a vari­ety of tech­niques for devel­op­ing the ultra-stealthy pro­grams for the Apple platform.

At a talk titled Advanced Mac OS X rootk­its at the Black Hat secu­rity con­fer­ence in Las Vegas next week, researcher Dino Dai Zovi plans to dis­cuss spe­cific fea­tures in the OS that make it pos­si­ble to write rootk­its that are vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble for untrained users to detect.

“Most of the exist­ing research (into) rootk­its for OS X essen­tially take older Unix-based ideas and port them to OS X,” Dai Zovi told The Reg­is­ter. “Mine pri­mar­ily uses the unique fea­tures of OS X and this makes it harder to detect the tra­di­tional tools and techniques.”

Full story at http://www.theregister.co.uk

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