6 Conventions

stand the limits of certain tools so that they can achieve a degree of indepen¬

dence from them. You are not your tools; tools are just labor-saving devices

that can be effective only when guided by a battle-tested hand.

Finally, security used to be an obscure area of specialization: an add-on fea¬

ture, if you will, an afterthought. With everyone and his brother piling onto

the Internet, however, this is no longer the case. Everyone needs to be aware

of the need for security. As I watch the current generation of users grow up

with broadband connectivity, I can't help but cringe when I see how brazenly

many of these youngsters click on links and activate browser plug-ins. Oh,

the horror, . . . the horror. I want to yell: "Hey, get off that social networking

site! What are you? Nuts?" Hence, this book is also for anyone who's curious

enough (or perhaps enlightened enough) to want to know why rootkits can be

so hard to eradicate,

5 Prerequisites

Stealth technology, for the most part, targets system-level structures. Since

the dawn of UNIX, the C programming language has been the native tongue

of conventional operating systems. File systems, thread schedulers, hardware

drivers; they're all implemented in C. Given that, all of the sample code in

this book is implemented using a mixture of C and Intel assembler.

In the interest of keeping this tome below the 5-pound limit, I have assumed

that readers are familiar with both of these languages. If this is not the case,

then I'd recommend picking up one of the many books available on these

specific languages,

6 Conventions_

This book is a mishmash of source code, screen output, hex dumps, and hid¬

den messages. To help keep things separate, I've adopted certain formatting

rules,

The following items arc displayed using the Letter Gothic font:

■ File names.

■ Registry keys.

■ Programmatic literals.

■ Screen output.

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