– By Dan Berkes –

Chicago — There are a few good security-minded sites and organizations in the Open Source world, but until today, Rackspace wasn’t widely known as one of them. All of that changed this morning when the Web hosting service announced the release of a tool designed to reverse the effects of Knark, a rather annoying tool frequently used by crackers.Knark is a type of Trojan Horse program known as a rootkit. It’s a loadable kernel module that, when inserted by an unauthorized visitor, will not only hide itself, but any other files and directories at the discretion of its handler, as well as any outgoing or incoming TCP or UDP connections. With this ability to cover any intrusion and cloak an ongoing security breach, Knark is a major headache for system administrators.

For Rackspace, Knark was much more than a simple headache, but a nightmare waiting to happen. The company made a name for itself by offering Linux-based hosting, and boasts more than 2,000 Linux servers in its San Antonio, Texas, data center.

Marketing manager Madel Robles said that discovering a way to counter Knark was just routine business for Rackspace. “Our product development team is always looking into anything that might be an issue for the servers,” she said from the Comdex show floor.

The solution to the problem is a small program created by Rackspace developer Kelley Spoon. Once applied, everything hidden by Knark comes back into view, allowing a system administrator to perform a security audit to determine if a system has been compromised.

While Alamo can’t completely counter what Knark does, it will provide system administrators with enough useful information, said Spoon. Anyone who wants to build on the foundation of Alamo is free to do so — the program is, of course, released as Open Source and complete with code.

The release of Alamo is a first for Rackspace, and most likely a first for all Web hosting companies, said Robles. “I think we’ve probably rolled out fixes and patches in the past, especially for our own servers. As far as I know, this is the first time we’ve made something like this available to the public.”

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.

Mozillaquest.com has a story about AbiWord, an anonymous reader tells us. “Microsoft Word likely is the most used word processor, and it has become the industry standard for word processing software — at least for the Microsoft (MS) Windows platform. However, if you use one of those other platforms such as Linux, or if you would like a free MS-Word-like program for your MS-Windows-based computer, take AbiWord for a spin around the block.
AbiWord is still in the beta stage. Nevertheless, it is quite usable for limited, regular duty.”

ZDNet reports that the Adore worm is “designed to create so-called back doors in the
security of Linux systems and send information identifying the compromised systems to four
different e-mail addresses hosted on servers in China and the United States.”

It’s posted at LWN.net: “We still look like we’re on target for a 0.7.2 release late this
week. We’re especially excited about this release, as it includes
the first drop of some cool features, as well as the addition of
some features to other components that we find pretty nifty and are
sure you will too.”

From PR Newswire: Conversay, a global leader in
speech technology solutions for both mobile and traditional Internet access
devices, announced today it is partnering with Seoul-based PalmPalm Technology
Inc., the leading software company optimizing the Linux OS for mobile devices.
Conversay will integrate its speech recognition software into the “Tynux”
embedded Linux platform developed by PalmPalm, to be used on smart phones, Web
appliances, wireless devices and more.

More information from a press release at InternetWire: A securities class action lawsuit was commenced
on behalf all persons who acquired Red Hat, Inc. (NASDAQ: RHAT) (“Red Hat” or the “Company”) securities
between August 11, 1999 and March 19, 2001 (the “Class Period”). A copy of the complaint is available from
the Court or from Bernstein Liebhard & Lifshitz, LLP. Please visit our website at www.bernlieb.com or contact
us at(800)217-1522 or by email at RHAT@bernlieb.com.

LinuxGram reports that Dell is saying that 13% of the servers it’s currently shipping are Linux boxes. Analysts are all happy.

LWN.net has posted this note from Caldera. “During code audits of the Linux Kernel several security problems
have been found. Some of them allow a local attacker to gain
root privileges through race conditions, others allow reading
and possibly writing of random kernel memory.

With these patches now being available in the 2.2.19 kernel, this
update backports them to the kernels used in our products.”

LinuxGram has a story about Fujitsu Software Technology’s new business idea. “Fujitsu Softek has serious ambitions that have been fanned by the market projections of analysts who claim the
market for storage devices will soon pass the value of the server market. Storage is supposed to be worth $60 billion
in 2004, servers only $54 billion.”

From LWN.net: GTK+-1.3.3 has been released. This is a preview release of the
unstable branch of GTK+ and is meant for:

Those interested in the development of GTK+.

People planning to port to the upcoming GTK+-2.0 version of GTK+.
Note: this is a tentative API-freeze release, major API changes
beyond the remaining open ‘2.0 API freeze’ bugs in bugzilla are
unlikely to occour before GTK+-2.0 is released. There’s also a similar announcement there for GLib 1.3.3.