Column - The future's so bright I gotta wear shades

Konstantin Klyagin

Say, what do Ozzy Osbourne and a rootkit have in common? First of all, both are pieces of a very old technology. And both are released and successfully distributed by Sony Music. Not for free, of course. Well, good rootkits must cost money.

When asked to write about a thing such as commercially distributed hidden rootkits, one can hardly say anything new. During the past weeks, every bit of an opinion has been written. I hate Sony - wrote some. They gonna get me - wrote others. While some folks said, I don’t care or Pass me that CD again.

The whole Sony CD buzz made me come up with a short futuristic story. An imaginable security news report in November 2014 issue of hakin9. Here goes:

It has been 10 years since Sony BMG first introduced its groundbreaking solution to effectively protect copyrighted content. Since that time, many major recording, software and publishing companies adapted and improved the technology, to which we owe the absolute inexistence of one of the worst problems of the beginning of the century - piracy. From the modern world, free of pirate software and CDs, let us look back into the history of the fight against piracy.

In 2005, Sony released a music CD, which would install a rootkit on every customer’s computer. It allowed the company to access the customers’ computers anytime to see if the software they have is licensed. The response of the users community was mostly positive, though some geeks were against this measure. By researching into the rootkit and publishing the instructions on how to use it, they however made the next step possible. The company was not the only authority that could check for pirate materials on user’s computer anymore. Now users could check each other’s computers and report piracy cases to Sony. It opened new horizons to pursuing the law in the formerly completely anarchic cyber world. Fighting piracy as a personal responsibility for everyone!

In 2008, when there were still many piracy-unprotected PCs, prominent minds at Pear Computers decided to take advantage of the well-known brute force password cracking technique. Every melody downloaded with their iRap solution executed a code which ran automatic scanning for PCs that didn’t have any anti-piracy software. This way the protection agents could be installed on computers that stood unprotected before. We must use all possible measures to free the world from piracy - said Pear Computers CEO, Stan Werkin, on the annual copyright congress in Shanghai.

Since 2007, no small shareware, no Hello, world! application comes without its own rootkit to assure that not a single PC remains vulnerable to piracy. Corporations invested billions of dollars to create anti-piracy agents, based on the outdated worm technology. Anti-piracy agents traveling the net would install rootkits on computers that by mistake had no pre-installed rootkit in the OEM package.

Finally, in 2010 all the techniques formerly known as destructive, got to serve the noble aim to completely eliminate piracy. DoS attacks, port sniffing, mutating viruses, trojan horses and worms installed various rootkits on customers’ computers. As a positive effect, the world also got rid of viruses and worms distributed by crackers. They were completely crowded out by the anti-piracy agents teemed in the Internet.

Freedom of piracy is one of the greatest freedoms the humanity gained in the most important virtual battle of all. It’s been a long way till these days, when we can enjoy licensed music, movies and bug-free software. Thank to such names as Pear, Pronomount, Werner Sisters, Necrosaft and Well-Mort.

Note from the editor. We are terribly sorry to inform you about a typo which has occurred in the article printed above. Every occurrence of the word piracy was supposed to be privacy. Please bear with us and accept our apologies.