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Sony Virus Close to 0wning Planet And Peoples' Computers Posted by Pile (9524 views) [E-Mail link] [Faulty Products] Here's a sordid tale of corporate control gone horribly wrong. In order to combat people copying audio CDs to computer, Sony worked with a company called First4Internet to employ copy protection to a large array of audio CDs by artists such as Neil Diamond, Cindy Lauper and Celine Dion. The company that installed this XCP copy protection utilized what's known as a "rootkit" in hacker jargon: a set of libraries that allows programs to secretly take over portions of a computer. Unbeknowst to consumers who placed these audio CDs into their computers, they were secretly infiltrated by the software. That would be bad enough, except: a) Sony underestimated the extent to which this viral code would spread (see image) and b) The code has a nasty back door that everyone knows about now that (due to Sony's equally-incompetent uninstall service) allows virtually any web page on the Internet the ability to download and execute programs on peoples' computers. To say this is a mammoth security debacle is an understatement. Sony is rapidly trying to recall the distribution of these CDs but it's obviously too late now. For the rest of us who didn't get infected, we can look forward to Celine Dion fans' computers spamming us for the next six months. Sony says its copy-protected CDs are clearly marked, but the front labels don't identify whether they use the XCP software. That information is included in small print on the back of the CD, which reads "?cp.sonybmg.com/xcp". It now appears that at least 568,200 nameservers have witnessed DNS queries related to the rootkit. How many hosts does this correspond to? Only Sony (and First4Internet) knows...unsurprisingly, they are not particularly communicative. But at that scale, it doesn't take much to make this a multi-million host, worm-scale Incident. Details Boing Boing roundup of Sony's various "Anti-Customer" technology   Posted by Mickey on 2005-11-21 21:18:00 Who thinks that people should be able to download music for free? I mean if they're doing it for the money, then they don't deserve it anyway. Its like someone who doesn't like baseball trying out for the Yankees. 1 Article displayed.

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