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Excerpt - LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — In a rare discussion on the severity of the Windows malware scourge, a Microsoft security official said businesses should consider investing in an automated process to wipe hard drives and reinstall operating systems as a practical way to recover from malware infestation. "When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit," Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft, said in a presentation at...

   Texas Sues Sony Over Alleged CD Spyware --  Here is the description by the guy who discovered it: http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html along with a ton of commentary. --it's not just Sony - they just happened to be caught.  Just remember - many movie and music companies are not happy that you can burn CDs and send files over the internet, regardless of what you were going to burn or send - they would rather you not have the ability at all, end of story. In Canada they had resorted to getting a tax in place on recordable media and players,  Depends...

AUSTIN - Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott today sued Sony BMG Music Entertainment as the first state in the nation to bring legal action against SONY for illegal "spyware." The suit is also the first filed under the state’s spyware law of 2005. It alleges the company surreptitiously installed the spyware on millions of compact music discs (CDs) that consumers inserted into their computers when they play the CDs, which can compromise the systems. The Attorney General’s lawsuit alleges the New York-based company violated a new Texas law protecting consumers from the hidden spyware. The company accomplished this by using...

exas is suing Sony BMG Music Entertainment, alleging the company illegally installed spyware on millions of music CDs that Attorney General Greg Abbott says can make computers “vulnerable to computer viruses and other forms of attack.” Abbott said the spyware installs files onto the computers on which the CDs are played. "Sony has engaged in a technological version of cloak and dagger deceit against consumers by hiding secret files on their computers," Abbott said. "Consumers who purchased a Sony CD thought they were buying music. Instead, they received spyware that can damage a computer, subject it to viruses and expose...

Sony's controversial DRM technology - which installs rootkit-style software when users play Sony BMG CDs on Windows PCs - can be defeated easily with nothing more than a piece of masking tape, security researchers have discovered. Sony BMG has endured a public-relations and legal nightmare after it emerged digital rights management (DRM) software installed on some of its music CDs (First4Internet XCP program) created a handy means for hackers to hide malware from anti-virus scanning programs....

Sony's controversial copy-protection scheme had been in use for seven months before its cloaking rootkit was discovered, leading one analyst to question the effectiveness of the security industry. "[For] at least for seven months, Sony BMG Music CD buyers have been installing rootkits on their PCs. Why then did no security software vendor detect a problem and alert customers?" asked Joe Wilcox, an analyst with JupiterResearch. "Where the failure is, that's the question mark. Is it an indictment of how consumers view security software, that they have a sense of false protection, even when they don't update their anti-virus and...

When the news first broke in the mainstream press that Windows expert and blogger Mark Russinovich (he wrote a book about Windows for Microsoft) had found that Sony's anti-piracy efforts had gone too far and that Sony's DRM was installing an undetectable rootkit on customers' computers which they couldn't safely remove, the first reaction from Microsoft was guarded. They were concerned, they said, and were evaluating what, if anything, to do: Microsoft, which also ships an anti-spyware program, recently renamed "Windows Defender," hasn't yet decided whether it will also flag the Sony DRM software as malicious code, the spokesperson said....

The Copyright Office is conducting a rulemaking proceeding mandated by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which provides that the Librarian of Congress may exempt certain classes of works from the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. The purpose of this rulemaking proceeding is to determine whether there are particular classes of works as to which users are, or are likely to be, adversely affected in their ability to make noninfringing uses due to the prohibition on circumvention of measures that protect access. The scope of this rulemaking does not include technological measures that prevent...

AnyDVD tackles Sony DRM Rootkit Virus! If AnyDVD is installed and active on your PC, the new so-called "Sony DRM Rootkit Virus" has no access to your system and the affected audio CD appears unprotected regardless! Another good reason to get AnyDVD!

BOSTON (AP) -- The fallout from a hidden copy-protection program that Sony BMG Music Entertainment put on some CDs is only getting worse. Sony's suggested method for removing the program widened the security hole the original software created, researchers say. Sony has moved to recall the discs in question. But music fans who have listened to them on their computers or tried to remove the dangerous software they deposited could still be vulnerable. "This is a surprisingly bad design from a security standpoint," said Ed Felten, a Princeton University computer science professor who explored the removal program with a graduate...

Not only is Sony no longer selling the RootKit CDs, .... according to a USAToday article, "Sony is to pull their controversial rootkit CDs from store shelves". A nice gesture, but a little late. .... "Sony's DRM rootkit has been found by Dan Kaminsky to have infected at least half a million networks". .... Dan has even put together some pretty pictures of the breadth of the infection.... "With so many people infected, it's unfortunate that from the Washington Post comes the news that "serious security flaws have been found in the software that Sony is distributing to users who...

More than one-half million networks infected by Sony including U.S. military and various countries. Dan Kaminsky, http://www.doxpara.com/ ,is the expert who broke this and did the work. His U.S. and Europe infection maps are shown below and are frightening. Dan did a hell of a good job. Search Google News for "sony numbers trouble" for more in an excellent article today that is very worth reading.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment said Friday that it will suspend production of CDs with copy-protection technology that has been exploited by virus writers to try to hide their malicious code on PCs. The decision by the music label comes after 10 days of controversy around the technology, which is designed to limit the number of copies that can be made of the CD and to prevent a computer user from making unprotected MP3s of the music. Security experts blasted the technology because it uses "rootkit" techniques to hide itself on hard drives and could be used by virus writers to...

Virus writers have begun taking advantage of Sony-BMG's use of rootkit technology in DRM software bundled with its music CDs. 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....

Sony is in trouble but we might be the ones who lose out in the end, says technology commentator Bill Thompson. Sony says it has been using XCP for months Sony BMG, the record company part of the multinational corporation that makes laptops, TVs, movies and many other things, is in trouble this week thanks to a copy protection scheme it has used on a number of its CDs. The software, called Extended Copy Protection or XCP, hides itself on your hard drive using techniques normally reserved for viruses, worms and trojans, which use similar "rootkits" to evade detection. And...

Sony is apparently borrowing a tactic from hackers for its digital-rights management technology, and some security experts question the practice. Security researchers have identified a rootkit -- software used by hackers to hide their malicious code from anti-virus and anti-spyware defenses -- within the copy protection scheme Sony BMG Music Entertainment uses to prevent music CDs from being copied to computers. The digital rights management (DRM) technology that Sony BMG uses limits the number of times a CD can be "ripped" to a computer. To prevent the DRM software from being easily circumvented, the copy protection's creator -- a U.K.-based...

From slashdot.org article:"SysInternals.com guru Mark Russinovich has a detailed investigation of a rootkit from Sony Music. It's installed with a DRM-encumbered music CD, Van Zant's "Get Right with the Man". (Mmmm, delicious irony!) The rootkit introduces several security holes into the system that could be exploited by others, such as hiding any executable file that starts with '$sys$'. Russinovich also identifies several programming bugs in the method it uses to hook system calls, and chronicles the painful steps he had to take to 'exorcise the daemon' from his system." Last week when I was testing the latest version of RootkitRevealer...

Free utility can reveal rootkits, hidden software used by hackers and crooks. Computer users have yet another tool they can use to find out if stealthy malware--such as a hidden virus, Trojan horse, or spyware application--has found its way onto their PC. The tool, called RootkitRevealer, permits Windows users to scan a computer for the telltale presence of certain kinds of malicious software. Advertisement That type of software, known in the security industry as a rootkit, "is a technology that's used by malware--viruses or trojans--to actively hide themselves," says RootkitRevealer's co-creator, Mark Russinovich. Rootkits can also help hackers gain greater...