Anti-Forensics the Rootkit Connection

Conventional rootkits tend to focus on defeating forensic live incident response and network monitoring using a variety of concealment strategies (e.g. hooking, detour patching, covert channels, peer-to-peer communication, etc.). However, the technology required to survive a post-mortem analysis of secondary storage, which is just as vital in the grand scheme of things, recently doesn't seem to have garnered the same degree of coverage. In this paper, we'l examine different approaches to persisting a rootkit and the associated anti-forensic tactics that can be employed to thwart an investigator who's performing an autopsy of a disk image.