Sony and the rootkit, the story continues

The news spread like fire last week: Sony has a installer on some of their music cd´s that might install a rootkit on customers pc´s if they put them into their personal computer. The rootkit software could not be uninstalled by normal means and has already been used by hackers to hide World of Warcraft cheat scripts from being detected by Blizzards Warden client.

It is possible to hide other scripts and software as well, one possibility would be to hide virii and trojans from antivirus software. All of this could be done using this software. Yesterday First 4 Internet Ltd, the British company that developed the DRM software, issued a patch that did not add an uninstallation routine to the software but remove the cloaking feature. It also patched the software to a new version.

Sony´s reaction to the heavy fire from the internet community and privacy groups was to point their fingers at music pirates. Thomas Hesse, President of Sony BMG’s global digital business division, on NPR:

“Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it,” he asked? “The software is designed to protect our CDs from unauthorized copying, ripping.”

Yeah, why should one care if some software is installed on his personal computer that can´t be removed by normal means and can be used for all sorts of malicious actions (which Sony as of now still denies) ?

Why should one care that the software makes contact to a Sony server every time a song is played (there is no information about this for the user and of course no way to stop this) ?

The patch Sony issued is hard to find, if you are lucky enough to find it it is possible that receive a blue screen when you apply the patch.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday November 9, 2005 -
Tags:drm, rootkits, sony