Application problems

[Ballbarian]

Nothing of real concern?

A new trojan which uses the cover provided by the Sony DRM component to hide has been detected by BitDefender Labs at 12.15 PM GMT today and is in the wild. This is the first ever observed instance of malware using the Sony DRM rootkit detected and analysed by Mark Russinovich.

And strangely, everything I have seen indicates that this does not affect linux machines.

I hate to quote from Wikipedia, but it was convenient:

Since it is specific to Microsoft Windows, XCP has no effect on all other operating systems such as Linux, BSD, OS/2, Solaris, or Mac OS X

and

This software was automatically installed on Windows desktop computers when customers tried to play the CDs. The software interferes with the normal way in which the Microsoft Windows operating system plays CDs by installing a rootkit which creates vulnerabilities for other malware to exploit. This was discovered and publicly revealed by Mark Russinovich on the Sysinternals blog. Other operating systems were not affected.

Now, getting away from the whole Sony thing,
auto play == vulnerability. I am not saying that I think less of someone who leaves it turned on. I just wanted to point out the risk. A healthy dose of paranoia is more effective than any anti-virus software known to man.