There has been widespread condemnation of Sony’s use of a rootkit (of virus, spyware and hacker fame) to enforce its so-called ‘Digital Rights Management’ on its music discs, but until now there has been nothing victims could do about it short of a full system reformat. Now Microsoft says that Windows Antispyware (soon to be Windows Defender) will receive an update to enable it to remove this latest dirty trick, and that those who do not use the program can still remove the rootkit with the forthcoming December release of the Malicious Software Removal Team (included with every monthly Windows Update):
We are concerned about any malware and its impact on our customers’ machines. Rootkits have a clearly negative impact on not only the security, but also the reliability and performance of their systems [...] We have analyzed this software, and have determined that in order to help protect our customers we will add a detection and removal signature for the rootkit component of the XCP software
[Anti-Malware Engineering Team blog]
It’s good to see Microsoft finally taking a stand against those who think they have the right to install malware on Microsoft customers’ computers simply because a statute gives them a limited intellectual right in a sound recording.