I was in Iowa visiting

and a couple of these...

and the Julie the Jinx phenomena continued...

Less than 100 miles away, in Iowa, a town was wiped out by freak tornadoes.

We noticed that Saturday night the winds were pretty darn strong. Gusts were measured at 38 miles per hour.
I had a great time and got to play a bit of Barbies with MC. Excellent!

I haven't been writing much...lots of stuff to do and most of my computer time is spent keeping up with my rss feeds. Have you checked out how many I read? Yep, all those sites on the left side of this page are feeds I keep track of (rather my bloglines keeps track of them). Either way, it's a ton of reading (on any given day I read over 250 posts on technology).

I've been pretty interested in the whole Sony Rootkit debacle. If you haven't read a thing about it, well, the geek world is ablaze with the tale of Sony's malicious software.

It seems that when you pop some Sony music CDs into your computer, the autorun feature (that most XP machines have--click to learn about disabling this feature) will automatically load software that allows Sony to 'protect' it's property from illegal sharing. This is also affecting Macs!
What this rootkit also does is open a hole that anyone can exploit. It masks software on your machine that you would never know is running unless you use a rootkit scanner (which you have to be a pretty computer savvy to even know about).
Where the danger comes in, is the fact that any hacker can write a virus that exploits this same software and load other malicious things on your machine. Much in the same way keyloggers and other nasties can run on your machine without your knowledge, these programs can hide on your machine. On top of all this, if you try to delete the offending software, you can disable your CD drive. Finally, the uninstaller Sony has provided makes the problem even worse! Nice, good job Sony.

If you are interested in the timeline on how this story evolved, check out this link.
For a list of infected CDs, check out this link.
And just so you don't feel like a fool, here's a story about just how many networks are infected.
It's so bad, that Microsoft is even treating this software as malware.

Finally, today, Sony announced that they would be exchanging the infected CDs. Too little too late.

Now, for the rootkit scanner that you need to find this malicious code.

That's why I just haven't had time to post. Yeah, that's it.

I promise a much more interesting (and non-technical) post soon.

Previous Posts

11.15.2005

Julie the Jinx makes her way to Iowa

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