Microsoft has acquired Komoku, maker of rootkit detection products. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Komoku customers include the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. These agencies also reportedly granted the security startup $2.5 million in funding. The Washington Post says that Microsoft will keep the company’s president and CTO, William Arbaugh, but will not continue to sell Komoku as a separate product or keep the Komoku name. (Arbaugh is a former computer network specialist with the National Security Agency and is a professor at the University of Maryland.)
While Microsoft has announced its plans for the Komoku software, it has not announced its plans for the CoPilot PCI card. This is a little odd in that Komoku is best known for its hardware approach. Still, it is unclear that hardware is even the answer to rootkit detection. About a year ago, at the Black Hat DC conference, respected rootkit researcher Joanna Rutkowska showcased several ways to outwit hardware rootkit detection methods. Software rootkit detection can also be outwitted.
In any case, Microsoft can’t go wrong by adding well-respected rootkit detection to Forefront and OneCare and by adding a rootkit researcher to its staff. Symantec and others have been working on this problem for years – in both the labs and in the marketing zone.
This is not to say that any vendor will actually solve the rootkit problem. One of the issues with security research is that those with the most money to conduct such research are the ones that benefit most by security failures. Should a vendor find a way to truly protect computing resources, the vendor would also find that they’ve killed off their livelihood.
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