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ss obtains the connections information via netlink directly from the kernel (besides parsing /proc):

https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/manpages/sock_diag.7.en...

https://github.com/vishvananda/netlink/blob/main/inet_diag.g...

Not many rootkits tamper the netlink channel, so in most cases it's a bit more reliable.

Nowadays, there's only one rootkit that can hide itself so perfectly: the Singularity rootkit. It also hides from auditd by using netlink_unicast hooking and other evasive functionalities. Analyzing a machine compromised with Singularity loaded is a real headache, since it prevents memory dumps for analysis.

https://github.com/MatheuZSecurity/Singularity

Okay yeah, sure. So it's not intrinsically more reliable or anything, it's just not specifically vulnerable to LD_PRELOAD. And it's not clear to me why LD_PRELOAD would be a particularly interesting attack vector, but maybe that's just my ignorance.

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