Sony BMG's new corporate anthem: Benny Hill Theme: The Sony BMG Music fiasco just keeps getting worse (see "Sorry, we thought 'rootkit' was Finnish for 'congratulations on your DRM scheme' "). For the second time in as many months, the company has been forced to admit that the digital rights management technology included on some Sony discs poses a serious security risk to those who play them in their PCs (see "Sony reconsiders policy on hiring 'reformed' hackers"). This security vulnerability is distinct from the one reported in early November and affects a whole new batch of CDs. "It's a privileged escalation attack," Kurt Opsahl, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the organization that brought the flaw to Sony's attention. "On Windows you can have users with different privileges, and because of security weakness in the permissions of a folder, it allows a low-ranked user to act as a high-ranked user." Unbelievable. Hopefully this meltdown will help the recording industry realize that copy-protection software is bad for everyone, consumers and labels alike.
Comment on this post
