Editor: We're excited to tell you that we have improved the scanning for rootkits. Beginning with the first updates in march we have added new anti rootkit plugins for SpyBot - Search & Destroy. Apart from that we have also developed a new tool - the RootAlyzer
Rootkits are a technology that is more and more often used by malware to hide themselves on system level, making themselves invisible to standard tools. Our new plugins help Spybot-S&D to Detect this malware, and our RootAlyzer shows you anything that uses certain rootkit technologies, even if it's not in Spybot-S&Ds detection database.
You can apply the new plugins for the rootkit search by just updating your Spybot-S&D as usual.
The RootAlyzer is a single tool which goes through the file system, the registry and process related lists. When you start RootAlyzer, it performs a very quick scan of a few important places, taking about a second on Modern machines. To check the full system, you have the possibility of choosing a Deep Scan.
Currently, the RootAlyzer is a work in progress (with a new project tools category in our forum to track bugs and feature requests), but it's already helping to easily locate most of the current malware rootkits.