Carnal Reason

Found an amazing article via Boing Boing. It seems that Sony Music is installing nasty hidden spyware on Windows boxes as part of a digital rights management scheme, without any disclosure of such. If you or I secretly put a rootkit on someone else’s machine, we could go to jail. If Sony installs a rootkit on your computer under the guise of playing a music cd, that’s different. All hail our new copyright masters. Here’s the story, as told by uber hacker Mark Russinovich.

Last week when I was testing the latest version of RootkitRevealer (RKR) I ran a scan on one of my systems and was shocked to see evidence of a rootkit. Rootkits are cloaking technologies that hide files, Registry keys, and other system objects from diagnostic and security software, and they are usually employed by malware attempting to keep their implementation hidden (see my “Unearthing Rootkits” article from the June issue of Windows IT Pro Magazine for more information on rootkits). The RKR results window reported a hidden directory, several hidden device drivers, and a hidden application…

Read the rest here.

Posted on October 31st, 2005 by pwyll
Filed under: law