The story to pay attention to here is the collusion between big media companies who try to control what we do on our computers and computer-security companies who are supposed to be protecting us.
Initial estimates are that more than half a million computers worldwide are infected with this Sony rootkit. Those are amazing infection numbers, making this one of the most serious internet epidemics of all time — on a par with worms like Blaster, Slammer, Code Red and Nimda.
What do you think of your antivirus company, the one that didn’t notice Sony’s rootkit as it infected half a million computers? And this isn’t one of those lightning-fast internet worms; this one has been spreading since mid-2004. Because it spread through infected CDs, not through internet connections, they didn’t notice? This is exactly the kind of thing we’re paying those companies to detect — especially because the rootkit was phoning home.
Meanwhile, antivirus firms are already warning about a new trojan in the wild taking advantage of the rootkit. This story raisess some questions. These CDs with rootkits have been sold for 8 months. Where was Microsoft? Why didn’t they and antivirus companies notice this rootkit themselves long ago?
When the story first hit, here’s the explanation given by First 4 Internet, the company that wrote the rootkit for Sony:
The creator of the copy-protection software, a British company called First 4 Internet, said the cloaking mechanism was not a risk, and that its team worked closely with big antivirus companies such as Symantec to ensure that was the case. The cloaking function was aimed at making it difficult, though not impossible, to hack the content protection in ways that have been simple in similar products, the company said.
So, Symantec and “the big antivirus companies” already knew about the rootkit? According to this statement, it seems they did. Are they then liable as well as Sony?
Groklaw member alangmead asked another valid question in a comment to an earlier article: Does that mean that Microsoft knew also and was complicit, deliberately ignoring the rootkit? Alternatively, if not, might one not legitimately ask if Microsoft’s anti-spyware is “sophisticated enough to detect the system changes” made by Sony’s DRM? Which explanation is worse?
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