10 November 2005 Blog Home : November 2005 : Permalink
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Record company Sony BMG Music Entertainment has been targeted in a class-action lawsuit in California by consumers claiming their computers have been harmed by anti-piracy software on some Sony BMG CDs.
The claim states that Sony BMG's failed to disclose the true nature of the digital rights management system it uses on its CDs and thousands of computer users have unknowingly infected their computers, according to court documents.
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The suit claims that around June 2005, Sony BMG began to issue some CDs that install digital rights management software that continuously monitor for rights problems, depleting a computer's available resources. The suit says the technology cannot be removed without damage to the system and that Sony BMG does not advise consumers of the existence or true nature of the program.
One could imagine that the class action will be joined by the makers of WoW and probably anyone else who makes software that scans for trojans etc.Update: The first non-Sony trojan to make use of SonyBMG's misguided DRM has showed up
Sony-BMG's rootkit DRM technology masks files whose filenames start with "$sys$". A newly-discovered variant of of the Breplibot Trojan takes advantage of this to drop the file "$sys$drv.exe" in the Windows system directory.
"This means, that for systems infected by the Sony rootkit, the dropped file is entirely invisible to the user. It will not be found in any process and file listing. Only rootkit scanners, such as the free utility RootkitRevealer, can unmask the culprit," warns Ivan Macalintal, a senior threat analyst at security firm Trend Micro
Second Update: Moonage Webdreamhas a (possibly partial) list of infected Sony CDs - if you have one then you may be infected ...
Also Sony has announced that is is discontinuing this particular strategy