Twenty years ago, Sony distributed malware with CDs to stop music piracy.
By the mid-aughts, the recorded music industry was totally freaked out by illegal file-sharing and other forms of music piracy. What was the solution? Sony, one of the creators of the CD and a major record label, gave the go-ahead to drop a little piece of malware called a “rootkit” on certain CD releases. If anyone tried to rip one of these CDs to their hard drive, a piece of malicious code was inserted on the user’s hard drive without their noticing to prevent that.
Here’s the story of that scandal. (Via Steven)
