Finnish anti-virus specialist F-Secure Corp. on Thursday announced plans to add rootkit-detection features to its product suite, joining a growing list of security vendors tackling the stealthy threat.

At the CeBIT show in Hannover, Germany, F-Secure lifted the wraps off the new BlackLight Rootkit Elimination Technology, offering the tool as a free beta through Apr. 30.

After that, the company plans to integrate the rootkit-detection capabilities into its anti-virus, firewall, intrusion detection and anti-spyware products.

“This is a unique piece of technology that looks deeper into the operating system to find hidden rootkits. We’ve already seen worms using rootkit functionality, so we know it’s a serious threat,” said Ero Carrera, a virus researcher at F-Secure.

According to F-Secure’s findings, at least two worms—Maslan and Myfip—have used rootkit tricks to hide their process by manipulating operating system kernel data structures.

With BlackLight, F-Secure is promising technology to detect objects that are hidden from existing security tools while offering a simple interface for removing threats.

Source: eWeek