Sony used to be associated with the popular Walkman music player, but these days it’s more likely to conjure up images of nasty spyware. The company’s anti-piracy measures have created a security problem for unwary Sony customers — and highlighted the inadequacies of a key piece of federal legislation, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
On October 31 programmer Mark Russinovich sounded the alarm. He blogged about a music CD from SonyBMG that, when inserted into a user’s CD drive, secretly installed software known as a “rootkit.” The software not only spied on the person’s music habits, but it also made their computer extremely vulnerable to hacker attacks.
After the news got out, Sony released a software patch to fix the problem, but that created even more vulnerabilities. The entire debacle took the computer security industry by surprise. Indeed, Sony’s flawed copy-protection scheme had been in use for seven months before being discovered. Even computers run by the Department of Defense were affected, making Sony’s ploy to protect its intellectual property a menace to national security.
Read more here.