James Delahunty
29 Nov 2005 0:37
Finnish anti-virus company F-Secure has revealed that it first alerted Sony BMG about problems surrounding the XCP copy protection technology used on some of the label's CDs on October 4th, after discovering it in September. "If [Sony] had woken up and smelled the coffee when we told them there was a problem, they could have avoided this trouble," says Mikko H. Hypponen, F-Secure's director of anti virus research. However Sony didn't act fast enough and that is why they are now stuck with this horrible problem.
An even worse fact for Sony BMG is that this proves the company knew about the problems surrounding XCP even before Mark Russinovich discovered it and posted it on his blog. This will bring more power to the lawsuits that have been filed against the company since Russinovich alerted the world about the problem. Sony however is also using the F-Secure warning to defend the actions that it took.
The company said it acted as quickly as it could and it expected to be able to go public when a software patch was available, but Russinovich posted the issue on his blog first. This forced Sony BMG to recall millions of CDs from 52 artists and offer "swap deals" to consumers who had bought the CDs. "We're very, very sorry for the disruption and inconvenience that this has caused to music consumers," said Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG's Global Digital Business.
XCP was developed by UK-based First4Internet. The DRM software applies limitations on how consumers can copy the CD's contents. The problem is that it uses file hiding techniques, similar to those used by virus writers to hide malicious software. This file hiding capability has also been exploited by virus writers ever since the issue went public.
Source:
BusinessWeek