Government-Funded Startup Blasts Rootkits

A startup funded by the U.S. government's Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency is ready to emerge from stealth mode with hardware-
and software-based technologies to fight the rapid spread of malicious
rootkits.

Komoku, of College Park, Md., plans to ship a beta of Gamma, a new
rootkit detection tool that builds on a prototype used by several
sensitive U.S. government departments to find operating system
abnormalities that may be linked to malicious rootkit activity.

A rootkit modifies the flow of the kernel to hide the presence of an
attack or compromise on a machine. It gives a hacker remote user
access to a compromised system while avoiding detection from
anti-virus scanners.

The company's prototype, called CoPilot, is a high-assurance PCI card
capable of monitoring the host's memory and file system at the
hardware level. It is specifically geared towards high-security
servers and computers.

Gamma, meanwhile, is a separate, software-only clone of CoPilot that
will target businesses interested in a low-assurance tool for
protecting laptops and personal computers.

Komoku launched quietly in 2004 with about $2.5 million in funding and
rootkit detection contracts from DARPA, the Department of Homeland
Security and the U.S. Navy.

Full Article:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1951941,00.asp

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