Who's on First?

[This was written back in December and not posted until now]
Interesting article in eWeek from Paul Roberts before the holiday, Antispyware Battles Rootkits with Rootkit Tactics.

This whole issue points out the need for user education, esp. with an emotionally-charged, redhot topic like rootkits.

Security hardening is a vital job for any security app. Good security apps - not just antispyware apps as Paul says in his article - use a variety of techniques for hardening and fortification. These techniques include masking certain processes in memory, for example, so attackers can't disable a security app that a user has chosen for their protection.

What's new is that *the malware creators* are now fortifying *their* apps using some of these security techniques as well as using rootkits.

These malware creators are crafting evasive threats, malware designed to circumvent legacy security applications. They're using every tool, technique and trick they can find to do so. We'll see more of these techniques in 2006.