We’ve all heard about the Sony rootkit. Sony released a “patch” in light of all the complaints. But to get it, you have to go to a specific website of theirs, submit your personal information, which will lead you to a download. You can’t uninstall it from your computer as it will disable your CD/DVD drives from ever working again. Sneaky. Best of all, the patch doesn’t actually remove the rootkit. It updates it, turning off the cloaking feature.
Now someone has developed a trojan which makes use of Sony’s rootkit. This is in the heals of someone else who used it to bypass Blizzard’s anti-cheating technology (a violation of the DMCA).
Sophos says that the Trojan known as Stinx-E uses the Sony DRM rootkit to make itself invisible through the file $sys$drv.exe. However, this does not mean that in not having the Sony DRM installed you are immune to infection.
The rootkit makes all files beginning with ‘$sys$’ invisible, and Sophos’ senior antivirus consultant Graham Cluley described it as ‘particularly troublesome’. He told us that antivirus software will detect the file when it is first run if it has already been updated to look out for it. But out of date antivirus software won’t detect the virus at that point, and once the virus is installed, won’t be able to see it at all. […]
Yep, record labels simply don’t get it. By DRMing their CDs, they only punish their consumer. I’ve yet to hear of a single instance where pirates were unable to copy the CD. And plus – when we buy a CD, is it ours? Do we own the CD? Then why the hell can’t we turn the CD into MP3s so that we may listen it on our pocket player?
Record labels assume that people only use CD-Players to listen to music. That simply is not the case, and to make a business dynamic that does not reflect that only punishes those who legitimately buy the CD.