Your Music CD and Hackers

If you popped your music CD into your computer, you may have unwittingly given hackers a way into your PC.

Some music disks from Sony BMG Music Entertainment have XCP Content Protection Technology. This means a program was downloaded into your hard disk to monitor how many times you've played which song in which CD, for example.

It also helps prevent you from making illegal copies of the music CD. It also knows how to hide itself, so that people cannot easily remove this copy-protection program. This program has left a back-door into your system.

Unfortunately, hackers can use that program (in your hard disk) to also hide bad programs (i.e., malware, spyware). This will make your antivirus program useless, unless newer versions figure out how to detect the "hidden" program.

Sony deeply regrets any inconvenience this has caused to consumers, and will soon address the security concerns brought about by this issue.

They're in the process of finding a simplified way of removing these "rootkits" from your computer. Please do not rush and remove those rootkits, because untested solutions may leave your PC unusable.

A quick scan of the list of affected titles shows some albums which feature these artists: Bette Midler, Burt Bacharach, Celine Dion, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Neil Diamond, and Billy Holiday.

Looks like I'll need to check the PCs of my parents. Argh.

Related Link: Immunize Yourself Against Sony’s Dangerous Uninstaller

[ First posted on 11/17/2005 by Manuel Viloria ]