What Is A Rootkit? How Does Rootkit Work?

Most of the time the so-called rootkits make the user believe that everything is perfectly fine. Your Computer may contain a virus or may be in a click fraud. At these times you don’t even know. They function practically as an invisibility cloak under which criminal activities are committed. However, if you know how rootkits work and the risks, you can better protect yourself against them.

What Is A Rootkit?

Rootkit is a set of various malicious programs that can infiltrate different authorization levels of a computer, conceal the actions of viruses and malware and thus facilitate access to the system for criminals from now on.

 Rootkits are not individual malware, but a whole set of malicious programs that nest on computers through gaps in the security system, thus granting attackers permanent remote access to them. An important characteristic of rootkits is that they hide themselves and other parasites from virus detectors and security programs, so that the user is not aware of their existence.

Depending on the level of authority the rootkit has reached, it can even grant all administration rights (called a kernel-mode rootkit), that is, full control over the computer, to the hacker.

Rootkits used to be made up of modified versions of standard programs like ps, a Unix command that shows the list of all running processes; or password, to change the user password. 

 Its name was also coined at that time: the term root in Unix designates the administrator and the term kit means something like equipment or toolbox. Thus, the compound term rootkit designates a set of computing tools that allow a hacker to obtain administrator (root) rights to a computer, something that kernel-mode rootkits do more explicitly.

 However, there are rootkits for many types of operating systems. There are some rootkits that penetrate to the innermost core, that is, to the root or root of the system, from where they begin to act.

How Does Rootkit Work?

There are very different types of rootkits, but the basis of their operation is always the same. And the process of infiltrating the system always follows the same pattern.

1.Infecting System

 Before rootkit infection, some form of social engineering is usually carried out as a preliminary step: cybercriminals generally take advantage of the weakest point in security systems, that is, the human component. By deceiving or manipulating other people, hackers often obtain access data or passwords. With them they then log on to a computer and install the rootkit.

 However, it is also possible to infect with rootkit in another way; for example, by drive-by downloads from an infected page, by downloading software from an unsafe source, or by clicking on a link or attachment in a phishing email.

The so-called evil maid attacks work in a similar way: the hacker himself installs the rootkit manually on an unguarded computer. The name of the method comes from the possibility that a hotel’s room service could infect the computers of many guests.

 2.Stealth

 Once the rootkit hides itself in the system. To do this, it begins to manipulate the processes by which programs and system functions exchange data. Thus, when a virus scanner is activated, it will only receive false information based on indications filtered by the rootkit. 

For this reason, often even professional antivirus software cannot identify malicious elements based on their method signatures or analysis of their behavior (heuristics).

3.Creating A Backdoor

The rootkit then constructs a so-called backdoor, an alternative entry to the system that the hacker can use with a stolen password or with a shell or command prompt, to subsequently control the computer by remote access. The rootkit then covers up all logins and suspicious activity.

This allows the attacker to install other software such as Keylogger, use spyware to spy on keystrokes, steal data or, depending on the degree of authorization, change the system configuration. Rootkit-infected computers are also often connected to so-called botnets, from which they are phished or DDoS attacks.