Mark Russinovich, a Windows expert and author of the famous Sysinternals tools discovered that Sony’s latest copy protected CDs install a small rootkit to protect the media content. Bothering? Add that the rootkit cannot be uninstalled using the Add/Remote Programs Control Panel applet and even if you bypass the file protection of the rootkit, deleting the drivers will cause you to “lose” your CD drive. Also add that the rootkit drivers are poorly written: they may make your system instable and open an easily exploitable backdoor for viruses and other malware, because the “DRM protection” hides any folder containing the string “$sys$”. Driver bugs may also prevent to boot your system in Safe Mode.

If this is OK for Sony, I have great news for them: they just lost a customer. I will not buy any Sony CDs marked with “Copy Protection” and I will dissuade everyone around me from buying Sony CDs. No music is worth driving my system into crashes or making the system insecure. It is just not the way how copy protection should be implemented.