Sony Releases Another Rootkit?

It sure doesn’t seem like it, but it’s almost been two full years since the lid blew off of Sony’s rootkit-infected music CDs fiasco, something that has scarred the company and made them the butt of jokes ever since. So whenever anything “minor” occurs with the company, people notice and immediately escalate the issue.

Case in point would be with Sony’s Micro Vault USM-F thumb drive, which uses a rootkit-like feature to disguise itself on a Windows PC. Malicious applications could be left underneath the same folder and go undetected. What I’m wondering, is whether or not this is unique to this particular thumb drive. There are many drives on the market that have the same functionality. Would it be unreasonable to think that they might do the exact same thing?

In this case, the “good will” was a security program that tried to keep itself secure from would-be hackers but ended up becoming a security risk itself. This is a little bit different from the original Sony BMG rootkit fiasco, where the intent was to deliberately add protection software to music CDs that consumers did not ask for or want and make that protection software hard or impossible to detect and uninstall.

Source: Ars Technica