MoMusings

No I haven’t fallen off the edge of the world, been kidnapped by aliens, or been hibernating. I’ve been preparing for the Virus Bulletin 2006 conference which was held last week in Montreal, Canada. Before that I was in France for 4 days at a customer site, I have also been updating a presentation for a guest lecture that I will give tomorrow at the University of Warwick, so, I’ve been busy creating and giving presentations. Oh, and that’s on top of my ‘usual‘ workload.

I will post a review of the conference in a week or so, covering my own personal thoughst on the conference and the content. This will include my thoughts on some of the presentations I attended on both the technical and corporate streams.

So, now the conference is over, I can make the paper I presented available to anyone that wants a copy.

Here’s the abstract that I submitted, and was selected back in March:

“Rootkits have been around almost since the start of computing, however over the last two years the threat has changed; no longer is it just a *NIX [Unix/Linux] problem, corporate and academic computers running Microsoft Windows are now an increasing target. We are now at a tipping point; rootkits are no longer a minor annoyance or threat, they are starting to become a major cause for concern.

Many corporate security staff have a rather vague understanding of rootkits, not just what they are, but how they work. Furthermore many have little understanding of the risks to their company or their own home computer.

This paper will explain what rootkits are and how they work. It will also discuss ways to combat them using methods that range from simple security methodologies through to technical solutions. ”

The full paper [in Adobe Acrobat format (PDF)] can be found here: http://arachnid.homeip.net/papers*

All feedback, comments, flames, suggestions, etc. are most welcome.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as I’ve caught up with the backlog of work I have piling up around me. So, if you see a news article saying: “A computer geek was found today buried under piles of work… he was finally extracted, alive, by teams of rescuers digging him out 48 hours after they were alerted to the disaster…” then you know it was probably me.

[*] All my other conference papers and magazine articles I’ve written can also be found there.