A rootkit is a collection of computer software, typically malicious, designed to enable access to a computer or an area of its software that is not otherwise allowed and often masks its existence or the existence of other software. The term rootkit is a compound of "root" and the word "kit". The term "rootkit" has negative connotations through its association with malware.
VMware LLC is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture.
Platform virtualization software, specifically emulators and hypervisors, are software packages that emulate the whole physical computer machine, often providing multiple virtual machines on one physical platform. The table below compares basic information about platform virtualization hypervisors.
WinDbg is a multipurpose debugger for the Microsoft Windows computer operating system, distributed by Microsoft. Debugging is the process of finding and resolving errors in a system; in computing it also includes exploring the internal operation of software as a help to development. It can be used to debug user mode applications, device drivers, and the operating system itself in kernel mode.
VMware Workstation Pro is a hosted hypervisor that only runs on x64 versions of Windows and Linux operating systems. There used to be an IA-32 version for earlier versions for the software. It enables users to set up virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical machine and use them simultaneously along with the host machine. Each virtual machine can execute its own operating system, including versions of Microsoft Windows, Linux, BSD, and MS-DOS. VMware Workstation is developed and sold by VMware, Inc. There is a free-of-charge version called VMware Workstation Player, for non-commercial use. An operating systems license is needed to use proprietary ones such as Windows. Ready-made Linux VMs set up for different purposes are available from several sources.
In computing, the term remote desktop refers to a software- or operating system feature that allows a personal computer's desktop environment to be run remotely from one system, while being displayed on a separate client device. Remote desktop applications have varying features. Some allow attaching to an existing user's session and "remote controlling", either displaying the remote control session or blanking the screen. Taking over a desktop remotely is a form of remote administration.
Ericom Software, Inc. is a Closter, New Jersey-based company that provides web isolation and remote application access software to businesses.
The Pwnie Awards recognize both excellence and incompetence in the field of information security. Winners are selected by a committee of security industry professionals from nominations collected from the information security community. Nominees are announced yearly at Summercon, and the awards themselves are presented at the Black Hat Security Conference.
Michael Gregory Hoglund is an American author, researcher, and serial entrepreneur in the cyber security industry. He is the founder of several companies, including Cenzic, HBGary and Outlier Security. Hoglund contributed early research to the field of rootkits, software exploitation, buffer overflows, and online game hacking. His later work focused on computer forensics, physical memory forensics, malware detection, and attribution of hackers. He holds a patent on fault injection methods for software testing, and fuzzy hashing for computer forensics. Due to an email leak in 2011, Hoglund is well known to have worked for the U.S. Government and Intelligence Community in the development of rootkits and exploit material. It was also shown that he and his team at HBGary had performed a great deal of research on Chinese Government hackers commonly known as APT. For a time, his company HBGary was the target of a great deal of media coverage and controversy following the 2011 email leak. HBGary was later acquired by a large defense contractor.
Alexander Sotirov is a computer security researcher. He has been employed by Determina and VMware. In 2012, Sotirov co-founded New York based Trail of Bits with Dino Dai Zovi and Dan Guido, where he currently serves as co-CEO.
Eucalyptus is a paid and open-source computer software for building Amazon Web Services (AWS)-compatible private and hybrid cloud computing environments, originally developed by the company Eucalyptus Systems. Eucalyptus is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. Eucalyptus enables pooling compute, storage, and network resources that can be dynamically scaled up or down as application workloads change. Mårten Mickos was the CEO of Eucalyptus. In September 2014, Eucalyptus was acquired by Hewlett-Packard and then maintained by DXC Technology. After DXC stopped developing the product in late 2017, AppScale Systems forked the code and started supporting Eucalyptus customers.
A computer security conference is a convention for individuals involved in computer security. They generally serve as meeting places for system and network administrators, hackers, and computer security experts.
Pwn2Own is a computer hacking contest held annually at the CanSecWest security conference. First held in April 2007 in Vancouver, the contest is now held twice a year, most recently in March 2024. Contestants are challenged to exploit widely used software and mobile devices with previously unknown vulnerabilities. Winners of the contest receive the device that they exploited and a cash prize. The Pwn2Own contest serves to demonstrate the vulnerability of devices and software in widespread use while also providing a checkpoint on the progress made in security since the previous year.
Second Level Address Translation (SLAT), also known as nested paging, is a hardware-assisted virtualization technology which makes it possible to avoid the overhead associated with software-managed shadow page tables.
A DMA attack is a type of side channel attack in computer security, in which an attacker can penetrate a computer or other device, by exploiting the presence of high-speed expansion ports that permit direct memory access (DMA).
In computer security, virtual machine escape is the process of a program breaking out of the virtual machine on which it is running and interacting with the host operating system. A virtual machine is a "completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system". In 2008, a vulnerability in VMware discovered by Core Security Technologies made VM escape possible on VMware Workstation 6.0.2 and 5.5.4. A fully working exploit labeled Cloudburst was developed by Immunity Inc. for Immunity CANVAS. Cloudburst was presented in Black Hat USA 2009.
CloudStack is open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud computing software for creating, managing, and deploying infrastructure cloud services. It uses existing hypervisor platforms for virtualization, such as KVM, VMware vSphere, including ESXi and vCenter, XenServer/XCP and XCP-ng. In addition to its own API, CloudStack also supports the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API and the Open Cloud Computing Interface from the Open Grid Forum.
Memory forensics is forensic analysis of a computer's memory dump. Its primary application is investigation of advanced computer attacks which are stealthy enough to avoid leaving data on the computer's hard drive. Consequently, the memory (RAM) must be analyzed for forensic information.
Veeam Software is a privately held US-based information technology company owned by Insight Partners. It develops backup, disaster recovery and modern data protection software for virtual, cloud-native, SaaS, Kubernetes and physical workloads. Veeam Software was co-founded by two Russian entrepreneurs, Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov. While Veeam's start was built on protecting data across virtualized workloads, it has significantly expanded to protect data across a wide variety of platforms from AWS, Azure, google Cloud, Microsoft 365, Kubernetes etc. Veeam's current CEO, Anand Eswaran, has been pushing Veeam's strategy to accelerate share in the enterprise with adding several layers to Veeam's partnerships. Veeam took over the #1 market share in the data protection category in 2H'22. The company headquarters is in Columbus, Ohio, United States.
LPAR2RRD is an open-source software tool that is used for monitoring and reporting performance of servers, clouds and databases. It is developed by the Czech company XoruX.
