Tigress is a diversifying virtualizer/obfuscator for the C language that supports many defenses against both static and dynamic reverse engineering and de-virtualization attacks. Tigress is a source-to-source transformer - it takes a C source program as input and returns a new C program as output. An obfuscation script (actually, a long sequence of command line options) describes the sequences of transformations that should be applied to the functions of the program.
An excellent blog post on how Wordpress backdoors work, how they're hidden, and how they're used.