Popular Rootkit Examples
- Lane Davis and Steven Dake wrote the first known rootkit in the early 1990s.
- NTRootkit was one of the earliest malicious rootkits targeting the Windows operating system.
- HackerDefender – this early Trojan modified/augmented the OS at the lowest level of function calls.
- Machiavelli, the first rootkit for Mac OS X, was released in 2009. This rootkit generates covert system calls and kernel threads.
- Greek wiretapping: In 2004/05, attackers built a rootkit that targeted Ericsson’s AXE PBX.
- Zeus, discovered in July 2007, is a Trojan horse that steals financial information using man-in-the-browser keyboard tracking and form capture.
- Stuxnet is the first known rootkit for industrial control systems.
- Flame is a computer malware that was found in 2012 that infects machines using the Windows operating system. It can capture audio, screenshots, keyboard activities, and network traffic.
What is a Rootkit?
The term rootkit is derived from the words “root” and “kit.” The phrases “root,” “admin,” “superuser,” and “system admin” all refer to a user account with power of administration in an operating system. Meanwhile, “kit” refers to a collection of software tools. So, a rootkit is a collection of tools that grants someone the most powerful capabilities in a system. Let’s briefly discuss this.