WoW's Warden program downloads an arbitrary, relocatable executable when connected to WoW. Unlike Sony's rootkit, it can therefore do *anything* Blizzard wishes on the target machine--they could set it to delete all your files or *anything* they program it to do, whereas Sony's device is just a rootkit to hide files and stop you from copying CDs that also works in Safe Mode. What I'm trying to say here is that an update to Warden can easily remove (or ban you) for being infected by Sony's DRM. But it really is ironic to see the two of these come into contest. Blizzard software has to be a severe violation of anyone's security policy after this (I know I won't allow that or Sony's rootkit), but I do hope they take the opportunity to help those infected by Sony disable the rootkit. That said, I'm not ever going to use WoW now--any software that downloads untrusted, unknown executable content without so much as my consent should *never* be allowed even on an untrusted network. Didn't anyone learn this from the security nightmare that is ActiveX? And WoW's program doesn't even put the Warden in any kind of sandbox!

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/newsbriefs/34/49#49