Jamie Butler: R^2: The Exponential Growth in Rootkit Techniques

Black Hat Briefings, Las Vegas 2006 [Video] Presentations from the security conference

Rootkit technology has exploded recently, especially in the realm of remote command and control vectors. This talk will cover the evolution of rootkit techniques over the years. It will explore the interaction between corporations, the open source community, and the underground. A detailed analysis of how different rootkits are implemented will be covered. Based on this analysis, the presentation concludes with a discussion of detection methods. James Butler has almost a decade of experience researching offensive security technologies and developing detection algorithms. Mr. Butler spent the first five years of his career at the National Security Agency. After that, he worked in the commercial sector as the lead kernel developer on a Windows host intrusion detection system. Mr. Butler was the Director of Engineering at HBGary, Inc. focusing on rootkits and other subversive technologies. He is the co-author and teacher of "Offensive Aspects of Rootkit Technologies" and co-author of the recently released bestseller, "Rootkits: Subverting the Windows Kernel". Mr. Butler has authored numerous papers appearing in publications such as the IEEE Information Assurance Workshop, USENIX login, SecurityFocus, and Phrack. He has also appeared on Tech TV and CNN. William Arbaugh spent sixteen years with the U.S. Defense Department first as a commissioned officer in the Army and then as a civilian at the National Security Agency. During the sixteen years, Dr. Arbaugh served in several leadership positions in diverse areas ranging from tactical communications to advanced research in information security and networking. In his last position, Dr. Arbaugh served as a senior technical advisor in an office of several hundred computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians conducting advanced networking research and engineering. Dr. Arbaugh received a B.S. from the United States Military Academy at West Point, a M.S. in computer science from Columbia University in New York City and a PhD in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Prof. Arbaugh is a member of DARPA's Information Science And Technology (ISAT) study group, and he also currently serves on the editorial boards of the IEEE Computer, and the IEEE Security and Privacy magazines. He has also co-authored a book with Jon Edney on Wi-Fi security that is published by Addison-Wesley."