James Delahunty
10 Nov 2005 8:19
Comments by the President of Sony BMG's global digital business division Thomas Hesse will most likely anger any consumers who have been unfortunate enough to encounter the "rootkit" style XCP DRM in use on some CDs distributed by Sony BMG. On NPR radio on Friday, Hesse defended Sony BMG from the criticism it has received. "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" he commented.
For those who would agree with his comment, it might be worth reminding you about how this DRM is installed on a Windows OS. It conceals itself in the Operating System after the installation, like many rootkits, and intercepts low level Windows system calls. If you remove it, your CD drive could be rendered inoperable and the only way to fix it is reformat the disk and reinstalled the Windows Operating System.
After the DRM installation was added to a blacklist by an anti virus firm, more problems arose. The Register spoke to one IT department support manager who told how the rookit DRM was making the anti virus software pop up alerts every second. He told The Register that three systems so far were flattened and blamed it all on the copy protected Van Zant CD. Also a patch released by First4Internet is not a secure solution either according to Mark Russinovich.
The patch simply forces XP to issue Windows commands that disable the driver. This procedure can cause a system to crash if resources are in contention.
Source:
The Register