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| From | "Jaimie Vernon" <bullseyecanada@hotmail.com> |
| Subject | SONY/BMG enters the malicious software business... |
| Date | Thu, 03 Nov 2005 19:32:47 -0500 |
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From Wired, on some extra treats for you from Sony:
The Cover-Up Is the Crime
by Wired News Staff
Sony BMG is facing a cacophony of criticism this week following the
revelation that some of its CDs are packed with special copy-
protection software that conceals itself with an advanced hacker
cloaking technique. We think the company is getting off easy.
The firestorm began when Mark Russinovich, a computer security
expert with Sysinternals, discovered evidence of a "rootkit" on his
Windows PC. Through heroic forensic work, he traced the code to
First 4 Internet, a British provider of copy-restriction technology
that has a deal with Sony to put digital rights management on its
CDs. It turns out Russinovich was infected with the software when he
played the Sony BMG CD Get Right With the Man by the Van Zant
brothers.
A rootkit is a particularly insidious type of Trojan horse that
hides its existence from users and programs by tampering with the
operating system on the most fundamental level. Where normal
malicious code might be content to choose a deceptive file name, a
rootkit "hooks" operating system calls that might reveal its
presence, and essentially reprograms them to lie -- like bribing the
coroner to conceal a murder.
And the lie the First 4 Internet code tells is a whopper. Under the
program's influence, Windows will deny the existence of any file,
directory, process or registry key whose name begins with "$sys$."
Russinovich verified this by making a copy of Notepad
named "$sys$notepad.exe," which promptly vanished from view.
That means that any hacker who can gain even rudimentary access to a
Windows machine infected with the program now has the power to hide
anything he wants under the "$sys$" cloak of invisibility. Criticism
of Sony has largely focused on this theoretical possibility -- that
black hats might piggyback on the First 4 Internet software for
their own ends.
On Wednesday, Sony answered its critics by promising to issue a
patch that allows antivirus software to pierce First 4 Internet's
cloaking function. But in our view, the hacker and virus threat is
something of a red herring. The harm of the Sony DRM scheme is not
that it enables evildoers, but that Sony itself did evil.
...
[I liked their excuse:]
"For the eight months that these CDs have been out, we haven't had
any comments about malware (malicious software) at all."
http://www.wired.com/news/rants/0,2350,69467,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2
Jaimie Vernon,
President, Bullseye Records
"Not Suing Our Customers Since 1985!!"
http://www.bullseyecanada.com
Author, Canadian Pop Music Encyclopedia
http://jam.canoe.ca/Music/Pop_Encyclopedia/
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