Symantec, Kaspersky criticized for cloaking software

The Windows operating system expert who exposed Sony BMG Music Entertainment's use of rootkit cloaking techniques last year is now criticizing security vendors Symantec and Kaspersky Lab for shipping software that works in a similar manner.

Mark Russinovich, chief software architect with systems software company Winternals Software, says the techniques used by Symantec's Norton SystemWorks and Kaspersky's Anti-Virus products are rootkits, a term usually reserved for the techniques used by malicious software to avoid detection on an infected PC.

There is "no good justification," for using such techniques, Russinovich says.

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The Windows operating system expert who exposed Sony BMG Music Entertainment's use of rootkit cloaking techniques last year is now criticizing security vendors Symantec and Kaspersky Lab for shipping software that works in a similar manner.

Mark Russinovich, chief software architect with systems software company Winternals Software, says the techniques used by Symantec's Norton SystemWorks and Kaspersky's Anti-Virus products are rootkits, a term usually reserved for the techniques used by malicious software to avoid detection on an infected PC.

There is "no good justification," for using such techniques, Russinovich says.

Both Symantec and Kaspersky concede that they have shipped software that hides information from system tools, but told IDG News Service they disagreed with Russinovich's use of the term rootkit. They say because their software was not designed with malicious intent, it should not be lumped into the same category.

Still, both companies appeared to be sensitive to Russinovich's criticism.

Symantec last week issued a patch to SystemWorks that disabled the cloaking feature. And a representative from Kaspersky says it's possible that his company could take similar action.

Unlike Sony's XCP (Extended Copy Protection) software, the Symantec and Kaspersky products do not cloak the fact that certain pieces of software are running on the computer. Instead, they hide data.

Symantec's Norton SystemWorks' PC-tuning software uses cloaking techniques to hide a directory of back-up files. This technique has been employed by SystemWorks since the 1990s to prevent users from accidentally deleting these files, according to the company.

Symantec issued the patch because hackers could conceivably use the SystemWorks cloaking capability to hide files on the system. Weafer described this possibility as a low-risk threat, saying that most security software would be able to detect these cloaked files.

Kaspersky's use of cloaking software is more recent. With Version 5 of its Kaspersky Anti-Virus software, released about a year ago, the company used cloaking techniques to hide checksum information that the software uses to determine which computer files it has scanned.

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