You don’t want a rootkit infection. Any malware compromise is bad, but rootkits—by their very nature—are especially nasty. The irony is that you might have a rootkit infection right now and not know it. That’s sort of the point of a rootkit.

Wikipedia defines it: “A rootkit is a stealthy type of software, often malicious, designed to hide the existence of certain processes or programs from normal methods of detection and enable continued privileged access to a computer.” The term rootkit actually derives from Unix—where the administrator-level system privileges are called “root”—combined with “kit,” which is commonly used to refer to a package of software tools. On a Windows PC it might make more sense to call it a “kernelkit” or “adminkit,” but the term “rootkit” has stuck.

Because a rootkit operates with elevated administrative privileges, it can do things that most software applications can’t do, functioning at a deeper level of the operating system than most security software is capable of scanning. A rootkit can hide files, processes, services, registry keys, hard disk sectors, and more so that the operating system itself, and other software running on the system don’t even realize they’re there.

When it comes to rootkits, you need a specialist—a sniper trained specifically to find and remove rootkits. That’s where a tool like GMER comes in handy.

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