Sony halts production of ‘rootkit’ CDs
Now that Sony has several lawsuits filed against them, they decided to stop producing CDs with the so-called “rootkit DRM” on them. A little too late Sony!
Sony BMG Music Entertainment said Friday that it will suspend production of CDs with copy-protection technology that has been exploited by virus writers to try to hide their malicious code on PCs.
On top of the lawsuits, the Department of Homeland Security had something to say to Sony as well:
It’s very important to remember that it’s your intellectual property — it’s not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it’s important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.
Even Microsoft feels the Sony/BMG DRM rootkit is malware, and will treat it as such. According to the Microsoft Anti-Malware Engineering Team:
We use a set of objective criteria for both Windows Defender and the Malicious Software Removal Tool to determine what software will be classified for detection and removal by our anti-malware technology. We have analyzed this software, and have determined that in order to help protect our customers we will add a detection and removal signature for the rootkit component of the XCP software to the Windows AntiSpyware beta, which is currently used by millions of users.