[DoctorIrokezov]

I have not read the book, Amazon link here:

The Rootkit Arsenal: Escape and Evasion in the Dark Corners of the System

The reason I am posting this thread is because there was a chapter the author originally intended to include in the 2nd edition of the book which the publisher did not find appropriate for print.

The author has made this chapter available as a stand alone essay and having read through it I find it extremely good reading material.

Here is a link to the essay in PDF:

The Final Chapter

Here is a sample, the Preface:

Preface

This content was originally intended to appear in the 2nd edition of The Rootkit Arsenal as an expanded treatment of the last chapter from the 1st edition. For a number of reasons the publisher has opted to preclude it. As the author, I can testify that The Rootkit Arsenal is an allegory in disguise. Beneath all of the device driver theory and the source code is a deeper message. Rather than let this message be lost through omission, with the consent of the publisher I have decided to release this orphaned chapter as a stand-alone essay.

Anyone who has studied malware, rootkits in particular, knows that it’s entirely feasible for a seemingly innocuous little application (less than 500 kilobytes in size) to silently undermine a system whose scale is on the order of gigabytes, millions of times larger than the malware itself. Having compromised a computer, an attacker can embed a rootkit deep inside of the machine’s infrastructure and then leverage this foothold to manipulate a handful of key system constructs.

The end result of this subtle manipulation is that the rootkit acquires a degree of covert influence. The external party can intercept sensitive information and control what happens while remaining concealed in the background, just like a black-clad stage handler in a Kabuki theater production. All it takes is the
right kind of access and a detailed understanding of how things work.

Stepping back from the trees to view the forest, one might postulate that something similar has already taken place in the power structure of the United States. Does this metaphor carry over into the greater scheme of things? In other words, have our political institutions been rooted? Has the infrastructure
silently been undermined by people who’ve acquired the access necessary to manipulate key components and implement their own agenda?

Pluralists would contend that this is not the case. They’d argue that true power in the United States has been constitutionally granted to “the people” through mechanisms like the electoral process, freedom of speech, and the ability to establish interest groups. The traditional view is that these aspects of our political system result in a broad distribution of power that prevents any one faction from gaining an inordinate amount of influence.

Over the course of this essay I will demonstrate how the pluralists are wrong. To this end, I’ll begin with a metaphor that will serve as a framework for my argument.