Rootkits have been around for awhilet but have largely targetted Windows and UNIX systems. Apple has enjoyed decades of security through obscurity but the successes of the iPod and iPhone have helped to dramatically increase the market share of OS X within the circles of popular operating systems. Developer Dai Zovi is taking away that obscurity with a series of lectures beginning at the next BlackHat conference. Essentially, the few rootkits circulating for OS X are simply ports of various UNIX rootkit concepts into the OS X space. Dai Zovi intends to present what amounts to tutorials on using Mach RPC mechanisms to make OS X specific rootkits that would be much more difficult to detect. "It's just extending the flexibility of the microkernel-based design in a malicious direction."