2007-09-05 Designing BSD Rootkits: Bonus Content

After months of critical thinking (i.e., procrastination) the first piece of bonus content for my book Designing BSD Rootkits is now available. This first article outlines an improvement (and a bug fix) to the getdirentries(2) system call hook shown in Section 6.4: File Hiding. Specifically, it details how to hide multiple files and/or directories.

2007-06-10 ONLamp: A BSD Rootkit Primer

Three months ago Federico Biancuzzi contacted me wondering if I would be interested in doing an interview about BSD rootkits. Of course, my response was an enthusiastic yes!

Overall, I think the interview is pretty informative. Federico has a knack for coming up with interesting questions. We discussed a variety of topics, such as, *nix-based rootkit detection, covert channels, and even Linux. ;)

The interview is available at O'Reilly's ONLamp site. It was also featured on Slashdot.

2007-05-27 bsdtalk 113

Last week at BSDCan I met up with Will Backman of bsdtalk to do an interview regarding my book: Designing BSD Rootkits.

Overall, I think the interview went pretty well (although I did ramble off topic every now and then). The interview is about 15 minutes in length and we discuss a variety of topics, such as, why I wrote the book, the authoring process, *nix-based rootkit detection, and what I would include in a second edition.

The interview is available in MP3 or Ogg format.

2007-05-23 Thank You Team BBL!

Last month (April 19th, to be exact) Team BBL released a pirated copy of my book Designing BSD Rootkits, and I have to say, that's pretty awesome! Allow me to elaborate.

First off, it's a high quality release and well worth the bandwidth, but, that's not what makes this so awesome. What makes this so awesome (have I said that word enough yet?) is that now my book will reach a wider audience. That is, more people will now be able to read it—the price is right, after all.

Fundamentally, I believe that most people want to pay for products that they like, and piracy can help in showing people how good your products really are. This is why I'm not upset to see my book distributed on various peer-to-peer networks, because if people like my book, (I believe that) they will go out and buy it.

2007-03-28 Welcome to [the stack frame]!

I live... again! Welcome to my (newly renovated) website! This site contains, more or less, all of the work I have done (publicly) in the field of computer security (or at least it will... eventually). This site also serves as a public place for my incoherent ramblings (i.e., blog).

Thank you for visiting! More to come soon.

Joseph Kong