Am I secure ??

Sony USB thumb drives installs Rootkit

So, it appears Sony did not learn from their little rootkit lesson back in 2005 when they installed trojan like behavior to protect digital rights on their CDs. Now it appears that lines of Sony’s Micro Vault line has crossed the line yet again. When the built in fingerprint reader installs a driver which hides a directory under c:\windows\. This directory and any files within are hidden when viewing files and subdirectories in the Windows directory. This driver then opens up a way for malware to sneak into that system as if you know the name of the directory you can sneak other files into it thus hiding them as well, not only does this hide the file from the user, but also from anti-virus scanners.

Not exactly complex stuff, but it is interesting to see that even commercial companies are relying on “USB hacks” to implement security mechanisms, the downside here however is that it can open the customer’s system up to malware. Sony has promised to release a fix…however it is not ready yet.

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