A nice (and biting) summary article on the shenanigans by Sony in sneaking rootkit code onto consumers’ PCs on a number of CDs they shipped. Money quote: The only thing…
A nice (and biting) summary article on the shenanigans by Sony in sneaking rootkit code onto consumers’ PCs on a number of CDs they shipped. Money quote:
The only thing that makes this rootkit legitimate is that a multinational corporation put it on your computer, not a criminal organization.
That ties into the real point of the article — not that Sony was scummy for putting this rootkit code onto PCs in the first place (we sort of expect Big Media to do that sort of thing), but that the OS (Micro$oft) and anti-virus vendors have been so quiet in detecting this, cleaning this, or even complaining about it.
What happens when the creators of malware collude with the very companies we hire to protect us from that malware? We users lose, that’s what happens. A dangerous and damaging rootkit gets introduced into the wild, and half a million computers get infected before anyone does anything.
Who are the security companies really working for? It’s unlikely that this Sony rootkit is the only example of a media company using this technology. Which security company has engineers looking for the others who might be doing it? And what will they do if they find one? What will they do the next time some multinational company decides that owning your computers is a good idea?
These questions are the real story, and we all deserve answers.
(BoingBoing has its latest roundup of news items on this matter, too.)