"and/or shut down major power plants (this has been done already)"

Wish it were so.

Just last year there were several successful attacks on power plants through the Internet, but this was not exactly trumpeted from the rooftops for the obvious reason (embarrassment). Los Angeles Times had several stories on this, as did several geek pubs, I'll pull some later if you are still doubting.

Here's a recent CNET story.

The story is overhyped. There have been no power plants shut down by internet attacks or worms. Nevertheless, your concern is noteworthy as is the general concern about malicious copy protection schemes. I empathize with the artists who want to protect their work. I also will not buy media that installs spyware on my system. I guess I'll just have to forego the listening opportunity.

"the popularity of Limewire "

It's so popular that I have never heard of it. Fill us in there Captain.....arggg..argghh...arrggghh.

There is such a contempt for big business in this country now. Worse than I can ever remember. IMO a majority of people genuinely feel that large corporations are out to profit with little or no consideration for the public at large. The sneakiness is what upsets people the most. Stories like this only fuel the notion. Real Networks and Apple Quicktime are also guilty of similar tactics. And what is "intervideo" anyway? Sometimes you go to play a certain commercial DVD on your computer and it tries to install itself unless you end the task.

John

I think many are concerned about the massive amount of corporate welfare also, such as the many billions of tax payer dollars in cash to the poor oil companies so they can afford to drill for more oil to own.

From recent news it appears that this and other largesses will be paid for by eliminating the home mortgage tax deduction and making employer provided health insurance taxable.

I wouldn't want to be an (r) congress critter next year...

What makes you think that a power plant would voluntarily announce that they have been successfully attacked over the Internet? They will blame it on an "employee mistake", a "cable malfunction", a "switch problem" or a "control room equipment failure" first.

What's out there has been uncovered by others.

Here are some good references for what the problems are:

Hackers Target U.S. Power Grid

Network Vulnerability and The Electrical Grid

Quote from the following:
In 1998, a 12-year-old hacker, exploring on a lark, broke into the computer system that runs Arizona's Roosevelt Dam. He did not know or care, but federal authorities said he had complete command of the SCADA system controlling the dam's massive floodgates.
and
Using commercially available technology, Vitek Boden, 48, had turned his vehicle into a pirate command center for sewage treatment... To sabotage the system, he set the software on his laptop to identify itself as "pumping station 4," then suppressed all alarms. Paul Chisholm, Hunter Watertech's chief executive, said in an interview last week that Boden "was the central control system" during his intrusions, with unlimited command of 300 SCADA nodes governing sewage and drinking water alike. "He could have done anything he liked to the fresh water," Chisholm said.

Cyber-Attacks

The last link is also scary in that it shows how clueless many of the Feds are when it comes to cyber security. GAO has done annual studies and found disasters in nearly every federal agency.

"It's no problem, because the enemy is not smart enough to break into our systems."

That is a direct echo of what I heard during my senior year just before several highway text alert signs were reprogrammed to show somewhat different messages, such as, "SURELY YOU CAN GO FASTER THAN THAT?!?", "STEP ON IT!" and other more.

This story has hit the Washington Post

Study of Sony Anti-Piracy Software Triggers Uproar


As I was reading this story and thinking this should go on the forum, I started flipping channels and came across Walter Murch on a TV show about the Tribeca Film Festival.

Somebody asked him how do you know when you are done? He said when he looks at a scene and he forgets how he got there, when the scene looks right and he forgets that he is the one who made the cuts is when he knows he is done. When it looks right and he doesn't think of his hand in the scene, he figures it is done.

This story has hit the Washington Post.

It also made Yahoo's "Most Viewed" today....

Its conclusion:
Russinovich called the offer of a patch "backpedaling and damage control in the face of a public-relations nightmare" and emphasized that users who try to remove the files manually after applying the fix will still ruin their CD-Rom drives.

Perhaps SonyBMG can blow out this and other released "protected" titles on Overstock.com for 5 cents on the dollar. Or perhaps they can't even sell them there?

Here's a really good Infoworld article:

IT under siege: The security arms race

Quote:

The malicious programs now making the rounds leave corporate administrators wishing for the days when viruses and Trojans were relatively simple and benevolent, and when intrusive code was removed after the crisis was over. With much of todays malware, the initial infection vector is only the setup and data destruction is the least of the administrator’s worries. After a computer has been exploited successfully, many worms and bots will connect to outside servers and download new programs or instructions. Using this “mothership approach” the malware becomes self-updating. Its eventual instructions are never known -- many times, even to the code’s writer -- until it has run its course. Several bots end up installing themselves as malicious Web servers, awaiting connections from their related progeny. The malware removes itself after it successfully downloads code a certain number of times and completes its task.

Good night and happy dreams!

Suppose this is the lesson: don't mess with customers!

http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/updates.html

Rudi

This update removes only the cloaking, not the software itself.

As mentioned in an earlier post:

if after this uncloaking you try to remove the software, you will lose your CD-ROM (it will be inaccessible).

Sorry, must have skipped that earlier post

Sony has always been big on this sort of thing which is why I generally avoid buying their products. This is just another reason to continue that trend.

Don't mix up Sony Madison, etc. with SonyBMG. The different divisions of Sony are famous for not communicating with each other, so there is absolutely no reason to boycott the rest.

Even if say Sony Madison or Sony Electronics tried to put pressure on SonyBMG, I doubt anyone there would give a rat's ass.

Better to focus on avoiding SonyBMG's CDs until this disappears.

Sony probably had no idea what technology the creator of the rootkit was going to use. I believe many labels are trying different schemes to find the "holy grail" that works.

Not to keep this thread going longer than it has to, but I could not resist one of the first uses of their rootkit outside of copying music. It doesn't take long:

http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/34

"World of Warcraft hackers using Sony BMG rootkit
Want to cheat in your online game and not get caught? Just buy a Sony BMG copy protected CD."

I would be surprised if the hacking community is Not trying to find a way to exploit this Sony rootkit, to infect/proxy server/phish/trojan/keylog pcs that have the rootkit from sonybmg installed...

think of all the damage that could be done, and people's bank accounts tapped out etc if a rootkit hack was used by hackers to drop trojans/keyloggers into infected users' computers... yikes!

I'll bet Sony will be facing a Huge raft of class-action lawsuits over this blunder.

You don't install a hidden rootkit on a users' computer - that's gonna cause leaks and lawsuits.

MS will probably have to come out with a security patch eventually to address it, though they shouldn't have to, and geez what a mess. Til then, I'd avoid any DRM/rootkit cd stuff like the plague. Why make hackers' jobs that much easier?

Just read on the Klipsch forum that Sony released a patch to remove the software which includes about 20 new discs that were released. Also read that the gamers are scrounging for those discs as then they can cheat the games somehow (I don't know how, not into games)

JJK

Of course now the cat is out of the bag. It will not be at all difficult for dozens of new malware to exploit this cloaking technology in other ways. THey do not need to borrow the $sys$ prefix they can develop any prefix or postfix they like.

Glad I bought my Acer Ferrarri 3400 instead of a Vaio now. Who knows what Sony installs on the Vaios?

Although Sony is the one caught in the act here, you will always depend on 'those experts' to find out how honest or safe other brands are and exactly if or what they have included on your cd, dvd, software or pc

Rudi

Article from the BBC-Very Good I thought.

"Sony is in trouble but we might be the ones who lose out in the end, says technology commentator Bill Thompson.

Sony says it has been using XCP for months
Sony BMG, the record company part of the multinational corporation that makes laptops, TVs, movies and many other things, is in trouble this week thanks to a copy protection scheme it has used on a number of its CDs.

The software, called Extended Copy Protection or XCP, hides itself on your hard drive using techniques normally reserved for viruses, worms and trojans, which use similar "rootkits" to evade detection.

And if you notice it is there and try to remove it you may stop your computer recognising its CD drive.

This is because the cloaking techniques involve making changes to the Windows registry, altering the way device drivers work and generally messing with your installation.

XCP was developed by a UK company called First 4 Internet, and Sony says that it has been using it for months.

It is one of many competing techniques used by record companies to try to stop people making copies of music files from CD as they fear that their customers will then make the music available online without permission.

Mac happy

The existence of the hidden files was noticed by Windows expert Mark Russinovich.

He was scanning his system for security breaches when he noticed something odd going on, and he quickly realised that the suspicious software had been installed when he first listened to the album Get Right With the Man by country rockers Van Zant.

The point of the exercise is to force you to use the supplied music player software if you want to listen to the songs on the album. And, as you would expect, it also limits your ability to copy the music files to your hard drive or MP3 player.

A spokesman for Sony BMG said the licence agreement on the CDs were explicit about what was being installed and how to go about removing it. It referred technical questions to First 4 Internet.

Of course, like so many other companies, Sony's super copy protection only applies to people using Windows PCs.

If you have got a Mac or a Linux box then you can play and even copy you disc happily, because the real WAV files that a CD player uses are there on the disc.

If I was a PC user faced with a disc that insisted on using some non-standard player to let me listen to the music I had just paid for I would have no compunction at all about heading off to the nearest peer-to-peer site to download clean, high-quality copies of the songs I wanted.


I suspect that Sony would be very interested indeed in a version of Windows that controlled music playback without the need for any extra software from them



Sony slated over anti-piracy CD
Or just asking a Mac-using friend to rip them into my music library.

Of course I would keep the disc, because this is not about getting music for free and depriving artists of their income. It is about letting record companies know that we have reasonable expectations for what we can do with the music we buy and we will not put up with their games.

Fortunately, it is possible to avoid buying discs like this. Philips, who defined the CD standard and then made it widely available, has been very clear that these music delivery systems do not count as Compact Discs and cannot use the CD logo.

As far back as 2002, Philips representative Klaus Petri told Financial Times Deutschland that "those are silver discs with music data that resemble CDs, but aren't".

And online retailers like Amazon will tell you that what you are buying is a copy-protected data disc that may, just may, play properly in your CD player but will not work as expected on your computer.

What Sony has done is stupid, but I am willing to accept that they did not really understand what they were getting into.

In fact, I would be surprised if anyone at a senior level in Sony's record division even knows what "cloaking" is or has heard the word 'rootkit' before they hit the blogosphere.

Copy choice

The executives who signed up to use the Force 4 Internet software probably did not realise that they were unleashing a public relations disaster of biblical proportions, but my pity will not help them.

They have just released a program that will make the files visible, though it still leaves the player software on your system, and First 4 Internet say they have stopped using these techniques. But there is already talk of a consumer boycott, not only of copy-protected discs but of all Sony BMG discs.

Five years ago this would not have mattered, but there are enough net users and enough blog readers out there to make a difference. After all, if you are thinking of buying a Van Zant album today and type "van zant cd" into Google, guess what you will find on the first page of hits?


Mark Russinovich stumbled across the system by accident
It would be nice to think that the furore over the choice of copy protection system will change the way Sony and other record companies think about their customers, and that they might start treating us as honest fans who will behave fairly if we are offered a good product at a decent price.

But I fear that they are far more likely to look at the way that Microsoft has cosied up to the Hollywood studios in designing Vista, the new version of Windows, and ask for similar privileges.

Microsoft has told technology companies that if they want to develop system-level software that lets Vista play movies then they have to get the approval of at least three of the major studios before it will be included in Windows.

I suspect that Sony would be very interested indeed in a version of Windows that controlled music playback without the need for any extra software from them.

And I fear that the fuss over XCP will prompt them to get in touch with their friends at Microsoft, and then all Windows users will find that they lose the ability to copy music CDs.

Mac users out there cannot look smug about this, since once Apple move to the Intel chipset for the Mac they have said they are going to start using trusted computing features in the hardware that will allow them to exert similar levels of control within Mac OS.

And of course once there is a "technological protection mechanism" in place then it is against the law - both in Europe and the US - to get round it, so open source players for Linux platforms will be illegal. All in all, it is not looking good for those of us who like to buy and listen to music.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Thompson is a regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Go Digital.

The ZDNet site has this page up. The article interviews a person affiliated with an antivirus vendor, who says what Sony did was not "malware" per se but rather "ineptware." He says antivirus vendors will probably begin scanning for such rootkits in the future.

Another article I recently saw mentioned that Philips, the creator of the music CD standard, refuses to allow vendors who incorporate copy-protection methods such as the Sony one to use the "CD" graphic, since it does not match the original CD specifications.

This is only the beginning. Has anyone got their head around the 'protection' mechanisms that'll be built into both HD-DVD and BluRay systems?
These players will have a mechanism that loads code from the media, buy a new disk and unkown to you it can load new code into the player. The idea being that if the security systems are somehow compromised then the player can either be disabled or new code loaded that implements tighter security. Sounds like a good idea until you stand the thing on its head and consider how it no doubt will be used by those with nefarious intent.
Firstly, this has got to be the dumbest way to secure content. The existing CSS protection system is buried in the players harware, there's no easy way to defeat it without physically modifying the player or simply building one that doesn't implement the protection scheme as has happened with cheap Asian players. But now with this scheme the internal code can be modified and the means to do it very easily distributed.
The more worrying aspect is that malicious code can also be distributed in the same way, effectively bypassing the firewalls that we've come to assume keep us safe from outside attack. By design these devices bypass the concepts on which network security is based.
And before anyone says it can't be done I can assure you it can and will. Things embedded in silicon are not immune to reverse engineering, the tools are out there and if there's enough financial incentive to use them then they will be used. Complete microprocessors have been physically disassembled and the design copied including the uCode.

On a lighter note though there's got to be some good script ideas in this. How about "Troy re-released with Real Trojan Horse"?

Bob.