Sony Music recently stepped up the ante on copyright protection by introducing a Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology on their new CD offerings. However, security analysts sounded the alarm, as this DRM employs a rootkit.

A rootkit is always bad news for antivirus companies – some malware use this technology for their nefarious schemes. But what is a rootkit? Simply stated, a rootkit is a technology that enables an application to hide its files, folders, processes, and services to plain view.

For a more technical definition, here is a link from Answers.com.

Now why is this bad news? Because it can be exploited by malware in the future.

Sony denies this is a problem. However, Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals say otherwise in this entry and this entry.

And in a fashion, hackers cheat on World of Warcraft using this DRM technology. Not only that, a new backdoor has been discovered that exploits this technology. Here is another description for this backdoor.

Symantec classified this DRM tech as a security risk. Computer Associates classified this as a spyware.

Sony has a software update available here. But read the Sysinternals blog first if you have this rootkit.