Sony BMG Continues Its Suicidal Security Breaching Streak

If you can stand another story about the Sony BMG rootkit scandal, you guessed it, there's a sequel to it already. Sony admitted, in what seems to be the most catastrophic episode for the image of the company, for the second time in two months, that copyright-protection software contained in its audio CDs can create a backdoor that exposes users' computers to hacker attacks.

Only three days ago, Sony had published a security patch to solve the potential problems caused by the antipiracy program as a reaction to the warnings of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which said the software "could allow malicious third parties ... to gain control over a consumer's computer running the Windows operating system."

The patch was supposed to secure a vulnerability caused by the MediaMax Version 5 content-protection software, designed by SunnComm. The next day after the patch was published, Princeton University Professor Ed Felten and one of his students warned that the patch itself can cause security problems.

It is perfectly understandable that Sony wants to protect its intellectual property, but the means to do this by secretly installing software on user's PCs is unacceptable. And when those measures are actually helping hackers install harmful software and gain access to the system, the plot thickens even more.