How This Book Is Structured

Let’s face it, developing a rootkit is a difficult task, made more difficult by the lack of structured and reliable example code from which to learn and develop. The rootkit industry is only now transitioning from individual hackers to teams of professional software engineers, leaving the professional rootkit developer with the task of starting from scratch to create robust, modular, commercial-grade software. This book is structured to offer the professional rootkit developer a detailed and robust code base from which to begin.

After detailing the tools required to build the examples in this book, nine chapters are devoted to developing a basic rootkit and progressively adding features to that rootkit. This modular approach to rootkit functionality introduces rootkit technology in steps, enabling the code base to be easily customized to provide only the features required by a specific design.

Following rootkit development are chapters on installing, controlling, detecting, and preventing rootkits. These chapters are of extreme importance to the rootkit designer and the security specialist, two professions adversely opposed to one another, but sharing the same need to learn as much about rootkits as possible.