Antipiracy software opens door to electronic intruders

This paper discusses how Sony BMG made a big mistake in the production of hundreds of music CDs equipped with a copy protection software known as XCP. The concept of XCP was to block consumers from converting audio files to mp3's, as well as third-party sharing. The CD can be normally played in several audio players, but in the case of using it in a computer, XCP automatically prompts a specific music player to be installed together with a rootkit. The rootkit is designed to hide the existence of any file or folder whose name begins with "$sys$". Through this concept, hackers can hide anything they want. Overall, Sony's aim of stopping piracy was a complete failure. However, Sony came up with a complex multistep process to uninstall the rootkit and unfortunately stopped the production of XCP-protected CDs.