SONY 0wnz J00!!!1

Doubtlessly you have already heard about the Sony DRM Rootkit. If you haven't you might have been living under a rock for the past few days. Hell, I had exams and was barely online at all lately - but I knew about it since the day one.

Anyways, I'm actually happy that this happened. Now I can really tell people how DRM is evil. And it actually does reach people - even those who are not generally keeping track of this stuff. The bad PR sony is getting because of this is actually making people think twice before buying their products. It actually stopped un4scene from buying any CD's this week. As long as I know that girl, I have never seen her exhibiting this much self restraint when it came to impulse-purchases! Come on, tell me I'm wrong ;P I must say that this is impressive!

It seems that Kapersky and Sophos are planning to add the rootkit to their antivirus signature databases. I'd say that it's a good idea because of the way it can be exploited. F-Secure apparently already did this - here is a nice writeup from their database. I would expect others to follow suit. Once McAfee and Norton join the gang, Sony will really start feeling the burn. Unless of course they already bribed these two companies to leave them alone (very likely!).

Apparently CDFreaks already included an anti measure that thwarts the Sony rootkit installation, in their AnyDVD product. I haven't tested this, so please, if you decide to buy it, do it at your own risk. I'm not endorsing this - I'm just stating a fact.

Sony is digging it's own grave right now. I really hope this will turn to a biggest PR nightmare ever. If Sony really gets a serious financial loss because of this, then perhaps others will think twice before doing something like this... But then again, sony can probably ride it out, and then blame the huge losses on piracy and develop even more insidious DRM scheme in 2 months :P

Tags: sony, drm, rootkit, warden, blizzard, un4scene, sony drm, sony rootkit, sony drm rootkit, sony rootkit wanrden, blizzard warden, warded defeated by sony rootkit, sony mallware, kapersky, sophos, f-secure, antivirus, security, exploit, cdfreaks, anydvd, impulse buying, bad pr, piracy, downloading, losses, drm sux, sony sux