First Trojan using Sony DRM spotted

Viruses and worms
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First Trojan using Sony DRM spotted

By John Leyden Published Thursday 10th November 2005 13:25 GMT

Virus writers have begun taking advantage of Sony-BMG’s use of rootkit technology in DRM software bundled with its music CDs.

Sony-BMG’s rootkit DRM technology masks files whose filenames start with “$sys$”. A newly-discovered variant of of the Breplibot Trojan takes advantage of this to drop the file “$sys$drv.exe” in the Windows system directory.

“This means, that for systems infected by the Sony rootkit, the dropped file is entirely invisible to the user. It will not be found in any process and file listing. Only rootkit scanners, such as the free utility RootkitRevealer, can unmask the culprit,” warns Ivan Macalintal, a senior threat analyst at security firm Trend Micro

The malware arrives attached in an email, which pretends to come from a reputable business magazine, asking the businessman to verify his/her “picture” to be used for the December issue. If the malicious payload contained in this email is executed then the Trojan installs an IRC backdoor on affected Windows systems.

Romanian anti-virus firm BitDefender confirms that the malware is in the wild but a full technical analysis of the Trojan is yet to be completed. The response of anti-virus firms, some of which have only promised to flag up rather than block system changes made by Sony-BMG’s rootkit, remains unclear. ®


Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/10/sony_drm_trojan/

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I think it was only a matter of time because of the huge amount of publicity this Sony RootKit issue has received.

Now we will have to see what Sony have to say, probably blame all the bad publicity.

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Sony should, in my opinion, legally be considered as a co-developer of ANY malware derived from their DRM software. Someone programmed this and someone made decisions that let it end up on music Cd’s, these people should be slapped with hard with fines and prison time. To let the company get away with some smallish punishment isn’t enough, punishment needs to be felt by people, companies don’t have feelings.