Piece of Tape Defeats Sony DRM

[utln]

The research note on the Gartner site says that what makes the Sony BMG incident even more unfortunate, is that the DRM technology can be defeated easily. The user can simply apply a fingernail-sized piece of opaque tape to the outer edge of the disc, rendering session 2 - which contains the self-loading DRM software, unreadable. The PC then treats the CD as an ordinary single-session music CD, and the commonly used CD "rip" programs continue to work as usual. (Gartner emphasizes that it does not recommend or endorse this technique.)

http://www.techtree.com/techtree/jsp/artic...9297&cat_id=582

[suryad]

Wow. What about not using Autorun? Disabling it....does that help prevent the crap from getting loaded up into the machine? Or does the action of just playing the CD for the music automatically load the crap into your machine?

[snekul]

This technique has always been around for CD's protected by multiple Tables of Contents (TOC). A normal music CD player will only read the first TOC at the very inner part of the CD. Other more advanced players, like some DVD players and all computers, scan the whole disk for additional TOC's that are part of multisession disks. This is why a multisession audio disk will only play the first tracks burned in a normal CD player, but all of the tracks in a computer. This is also how to add copy protection to the disc. The additional TOC's can point to completely different parts of the disk for the various tracks and then even relabel the audio tracks as data tracks. The data portion can then have whatever software, DRM, rootkits, ect that the company wants. The first TOC that normal music cd players read will make no reference to the data track, making it act like a normal disc. Any method that can force the computer to only read the first TOC will instantly stop most copy protection methods.

[DigeratiPrime]

good answer snekul! I wonder if there is scanning software that eliminates the need for tape when ripping the audio cds?

[svasutin]

Perhaps coloring might work better than tape. If users put the tape underneath, they might damage the laser eye.

Disabling autorun only seems to delay infection.

If the user want to listen to the CD, then the infection will continue.

I've tried the $sys$nero thing, but no luck.

Also, creating $sys$aries.sys and assigning permissions didn't work.

I'm still working on an unInstaller. I just get hung up on some of the keys, however, it appears, when I delete certain entries, and reboot, Windows XP automatically corrects the missing entries.