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Sony and dirty tricks !
Rob Lane - 26/2/06 at 01:58 PM

I decided to clean up my sons laptop and delete some of the junk. Whereupon it suffered a serious crash !! Nothing would restore or re-install from hard drive.

It's a Me machine and fortunately I had a full copy to re-install. However it did not require a complete re-install but a partial before it sprang into life again.

i then looked around for the cause and was quite disturbed to find it was an mp3 with replay that had crashed the machine. I did a search on the net and whilst checking came across this:-
Sony

I then checked over said machine and found some fragments of the rookit on that machine.
Checking with said son it appears a few weeks ago he borrowed a Sony protected music disc and played it. Seems the rootkit was installed on his machine and I had somehow triggered it trying to delete the copied mp3 and stuff.

I now wonder if this resides on other machines. I'm going to run the Rootkit check to see.


flak monkey - 26/2/06 at 03:37 PM

Yes there was a lot of publicity about this in computer circles. Sony recalled thousands of CDs after microsoft said that rootkit matched its definition of spyware, and so was bringing out a patch to counter it.

David


chockymonster - 26/2/06 at 07:01 PM

quote:
Originally posted by flak monkey
Yes there was a lot of publicity about this in computer circles. Sony recalled thousands of CDs after microsoft said that rootkit matched its definition of spyware, and so was bringing out a patch to counter it.

David


It wasn't just matching the definition of spyware, the whole DRM software used by Sony could allow malicous coding to be executed on someones PC. Their removal tool was even worse, it opened more holes than the original install.

Sony needed a big slap for releasing such immature code into the wild.