Sony Rootkits Defeat World of Warcraft Anti-cheat System
The rootkits and Sony's shameful attempt to spy on its customers made the headlines all over last week and there's more to come apparently. Even though Sony has offered removal and replacement for rootkit DRM, hackers had enough time to discover that the rootkits can be used to cheat on World of Warcraft, one of the most popular online MMORPG. It looks like the hiding capabilities
of Sony BMG's content protection software can make tools made for cheating in the online world impossible to detect. Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind the World of Warcraft title, has created an anti-cheating tool that detects cheaters by scanning the processes that are running at the time the game is played.
The Warden, as Blizzard called its own spyware tool, was actually defeated by Sony's spyware... how ironic is that?
The Warden periodically scans the status of all running processes on a user's PC, looking for applications that allow cheating, but also manages to capture e-mail addresses and other sensitive info as well. This application however, can't detect any files that are hidden with Sony BMG's content protection, which only requires that the hacker add the prefix "$sys$" to file names.
