Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far
November 2, 2005 by TomHere is the detailed article about the new DRM Sony is using that I talked about at last night’s meeting:
Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far
For those that weren’t there, it’s about this new DRM software which uses a poorly-designed rootkit to completely mask its presence on your system. Not only does improperly removing it render your CD-ROM drive unusable, but other malicious code could take advantage of this rootkit to hide themselves as well. Scary stuff…
-Tom
UPDATE: Secunia, a company that monitors security vulnerabilities in widely used software products, has released an advisory (SA17408) for “Sony CD First4Internet XCP DRM Software”. As I described at the meeting, among other things, this DRM software completely hides any software, files, folders, and registry keys starting with “$sys$”, which is why they released the advisory. Basically, this could allow other malicious code (such as viruses and worms) or even malicious users to hide things from system administrators and security software simply by adding that prefix to their names. The solution? “Use another product.” (c:=
Also, here is the official website of the aforementioned DRM software. XCP2 is the product being used on Sony CD’s.