If you read yesterday’s post about rootkits you may have noticed metion made of how Sony’s BMG music division had been accused of installing a rootkit onto user’s computers via some of the CD’s they sell. Once the CD was inserted into the drive, the rootkit was embedded onto the user’s system and cloaking its activity.

Mark Russinovich, one of the world’s leading Windows experts, discovered this by accident when running his RootkitRevealer program, not knowing what it would turn up. Sony actually knew about this issue before it was made public by Russinovich, but did nothing about it. In fact, they at first denied it, then when they were caught they promised a fix which has yet to show itself.

If this weren’t bad enough Trojans started showing up that specifically used the Sony rootkit technology to hide themselves from being detected by antivirus scanners.

Well, Sony finally made the wrong people angry. Microsoft stated that in one of the Decemeber updates for their Anti-Spyware application, currently in beta and available as a free download,  the Sony rootkit can be identified and removed.