History and stories
The music CDs that secretly installed hidden software
People bought a music CD and put it in their computer. They did not know it installed software built to hide itself.
1 min readStory
The short version
In 2005, millions of music CDs installed hidden copy protection software on the computers that played them, and attackers used it to hide their own programs.
The story
In 2005, the record company Sony BMG released music CDs with copy protection software. When someone played one on a Windows computer, it quietly installed a program to stop the music being copied.
The security researcher Mark Russinovich found it on his own computer in October 2005. The software changed how Windows worked so it could hide its own files. Tools that hide themselves this way are called rootkits, and they are normally used by attackers.
Worse, it hid any file whose name started with a certain set of characters. Attackers quickly wrote malware that used those characters, so it would be hidden too. The official removal tool made things worse by opening a new security hole.
About 22 million CDs were affected. After lawsuits and government investigations, the company recalled CDs, settled with customers and dropped this kind of copy protection.
Why it mattered
It showed that harmful software can come from a household-name company as easily as from criminals, and that any software hidden from a computer’s owner creates holes that others will use. It also showed the value of someone looking closely at what their own computer is actually doing.
The lesson today
Software you install for one reason can bring risks you did not agree to. Browser add-ons, free utilities and bundled extras still do this. Knowing what is installed on business computers, and keeping that list short, matters more than it seems.
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