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 in the summer 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. Rootkits modify the flow of the kernel to hide the presence of an attack or compromise on a machine. This gives a hacker remote user access to a compromised system while avoiding detection by anti-virus scanners."