Spyware and Media Player

If you’re a Windows user who uses Media Player, you could be at serious risk of spyware, thanks to Microsoft’s incredibly useful (!) digital rights management (DRM). The aim of this stuff is to stop you playing music (or reading ebooks or whatever) in any way that the seller doesn’t want – regardless of your legal rights and the entire history of music. For example, they can ensure that you only play music on one PC (bad luck if it crashes or gets stolen), or only on your birthday.
However, one “nice” feature of Media Player is that, faced with a file that it doesn’t understand, it will head off to a web page specified in that file and download software that will decode the file. All well and good – except that it does no checking at all that the software it downloads does what it’s supposed to. A recent report shows that this new version of Media Player (which is billed as an “anti-piracy” version!) is vulnerable to Trojans – and that these Trojans are already out in the wild. A single “Yes” click, to try and play a file in Media Player, installed an incredible 58 folders, 786 files and 11,915 registry entries in the investigator’s PC! Spyware is software that can steal your credit-card and bank-account details, pass your passwords on to someone else, and even peruse your email. And there’s worse – some of this nasty software will also use your PC to help in mass attacks on other people’s computers, often in order to blackmail companies for their internet access. So, be warned – say No to DRM. And, especially, to badly designed DRM. If you don’t know it’s safe, don’t run it. And, sadly, that includes Microsoft’s own flagship software.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 2:27pm on 21 January 2005
Category: Computers, Struggling, General