After many days of discovery and ranting by the Security Community -- Sony has decided that bundling their music with a pervasive software player, that then provides an access route for computer viruses and Trojan horses onto people's PCs, is a losing battle. Sony calls this little problem their XCP Technology. Sony has issued a statement regarding this problem. According to an article posted by Security Focus, Sony will suspend the production of copy-protected CDs, and "re-examine its digital-rights management strategy." Apparently, Sony is not recalling or offering to replace any of the CDs at the consumer end. This stance comes after a very ugly week where lawsuits were filed against the company in Los Angeles, New York and Italy. A Trojan has emerged taking advantage of Sony's DRM. The copy protection technique was provided by First4Internet Ltd - a company in the UK.
The RootKit tool that Sony has used will not be on any newer music releases, for now. That does not help the folks that have purchased Sony's CDs with the RootKit already on them, however. Symantec is offering a First4 Removal Tool on their site. If you suffer from Sony -- I would suggest you run the tool to delete this horribly written attempt at copy protection...
(I have been told that this is a "decloaker" only and does not really remove the RootKit from your system. Read all the directions, I guess.)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has an article with a list of the infected CDs. The Columbia and Epic labels are also suspect to using this copy protection scheme. They also have pictures to show what the packaging looks like when the XCP Trojan is present on the CD.
============
Update: If you find that your PC has Sony's XCP Trojan installed -- please be careful. By decloaking the hidden files and removing the RootKit implant - you can cause damage to your otherwise stable WIndows OS as explain in this article.
No comments:
Post a Comment