So you know that invasive rootkit virus masquerading as copy protection that Sony’s using on their latest music releases? One of the glaring issues with the DRM rootkit was that the rootkit’s method of hiding its processes from an interested admin or user is easy to figure out and exploitable by other programs—possibly malicious ones. So not only had Sony opened a backdoor for its useless DRM, it’d left it open for anyone else to use as well.

That theoretical vulnerability has become reality, but with a twist: people are buying Sony CDs and running them on purpose. Why? So they can hide cheat and macro programs from World of Warcraft’s anti-cheat warden. This development doesn’t really hurt or help Sony’s case here (though Sony has released a fix that eliminates the DRM rootkit, apparently). It is, however, a concrete example of an unintended use Sony and First 4 Internet did not predict.