How to detect and remove rootkits
Unlike viruses, rootkits have had a low profile for the past 20 years, but that's changing as their methods merge with those of mainstream malware to produce a threat that requires dedicated software to deal with it.
The name 'rootkit' comes from the 'superuser' account in Unix (and Linux). This is called 'root', and logging into it gives the user complete control over the computer, arguably even more so than an administrator account does in Windows. Normally, only a system administrator has access to root because it's so powerful.
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