Unless you were at Black Hat on Feb. 28, you probably woke up safe in the assumption that if a rootkit hit your system, reimaging would remove it. You probably also thought that the best way to search a PC's volatile memory, or RAM, was by grabbing it with a PCI card or a FireWire bus.

<A HREF="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2099603,00.asp?kc=EWNAVEMNL030107EOAD">You were wrong.</A>

At the Black Hat Briefings on Jan. 28, two breakthrough hardware hacks were demonstrated. One shocker was Coseinc Senior Security Researcher Joanna Rutkowska's demonstration of a way to subvert system memory through software--in essence, the shattering of our long-held belief that "going to hardware" to secure incident response is a security failsafe.