Sony rights manager implants spyware, bog claims

THE ENTERTAINMENT industry's battle against pirates is forcing its customers to install badly designed malware into their computer that is impossible to uninstall, a software has claimed.

Mark Russinovich, Chief Software Architect and co-founder of Winternals Software, was penning a piece for his bog on Rootkits, which are hidden bits of code, when he found a bit of such code by using RootkitRevealer.

He said that he was stunned when the software located a bit of hidden code that should not be there. After a bit of digging in his machine he found that the code was installed after he ran a Sony CD using some new Digital Rights Management software.

The CD Get Right with the Man by the Van Zant brothers installed some Malware which prompty cloaked itself and started to use a chunk of the computer's resources. Whoever wrote it called it a Plug and Play Device Manager so that most people would think it was part of the Windows operating system. When Russinovich deleted the driver files and the Registry key references, he found the software had disabled his CD drive which took some serious programming to restore.

"The entire experience was frustrating and irritating. Not only had Sony put software on my system that uses techniques commonly used by malware to mask its presence, the software is poorly written and provides no means for uninstall. Worse, most users that stumble across the cloaked files with a RKR scan will cripple their computer if they attempt the obvious step of deleting the cloaked files," Russinovich said. Now this is quite some allegation. As far as we know, Sony has not yet responded. µ