Sony DRM Rootkit — it’s worse



I did this as updates to an earlier post, but it probably deserves it’s own post now. The morning brought us the news of SERIOUS flaws in the Uninstaller ActiveX control for Sony’s DRM, then came news of ANOTHER flaw, this one a privilige escalation “attacker can take control of PC” vulnerability in the DRM rootkit (XCP) itself. The other bit of news to come has been the extent of the install base of XCP.


It seems that over 560,000 networks have the Sony DRM rootkit. Basically, Dan Kaminsky has analyzed DNS servers around the world and 560,000 +++ have cached DNS lookups for the site that the XCP rootkit “Phone’s home to”. These are DNS servers, so the scope of this could easily be millions of PC’s and could be 10’s of millions. Apparently there are few countries not represented in the list.

So, the DRM Rootkit (aka XCP) from Sony has major security flaws, it can hide other malicious software with it’s designed feature of hiding all files with $SYS$ in front of the name, the uninstaller was reported as buggy and requires an ActiveX control which is marked safe for scripting, remains on the system after uninstall. Some methods of uninstalling will wreck your ability to use the cd drive, the ActiveX control has multiple remote vulnerabilities and it’s on AT the VERY LEAST 560,000 PC’s and a reasonable estimate is that it could be millions. THANK YOU SONY.

I think I can hear the shouts of glee from malicious crackers EVERYWHERE.

At this point, Sony has said they’re stopping sale of affected discs and will be providing recall/swap details soon. I think they need to start getting out some information. How many of these cds were sold, how many have contacted the “Phone home servers” (to give a reasonable guess at the number of affected PC’s), I can’t believe they didn’t track that information. Further to help clean up from the UNINSTALLER, they need to start putting out numbers of how many downloads the ActiveX control has had. For much of this Sony/First4Internet are the only ones that will be able to truly give an idea of how widespread this is, but it is obviously VERY widespread. For once in this whole mess, Sony needs to stand up, take responsibility and proactively try to help people clean up this mess, get the word out to customers, etc….

Until that happens, the December update of Microsoft’s Malicious software removal tool may be the best bet for most users.

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