In God we trust all others we monitor
Patrick Stewin, Jean‐Pierre Seifert · 2010
Modern x86 platforms offer stealth capabilities, that are exploited by rootkits to hide malicious code as shown by the rootkit evolution. Recently, security researchers discovered a very powerful execution environment for rootkits that is isolated from the actual x86 host platform. According to the capabilities of the isolated environment the researches called it "ring -3". Security mechanisms, such as antivirus software, cannot reveal "ring -3" rootkits, since they are executed in the operating system which makes them unable to access "ring -3".