More Than Half Million Servers Infected By Sony Rootkit

<– Graphic depicts US computer computer servers infected by Sony’s rootkit. European and Asian infections are depicted below.  Click on each graphic to enlarge.

More then half a million computer serves – the backbone of all computer networks – are in some way infected by Sony’s rootkit copy protection study.  This according to an exhaustive study by computer analyst Dan Kaminsky whose conservative methodology eliminated another 350,000 possible server infections that he could not more completely verify.

On his Doxpara Research blog Kaminsky writes:

It now appears that at least 568,200 nameservers have witnessed DNS queries related to the rootkit. How many hosts does this correspond to? Only Sony (and First4Internet) knows…unsurprisingly, they are not particularly communicative. But at that scale, it doesn’t take much to make this a multi-million host, worm-scale Incident.

Sony BMG has responded slowly finally pulling the software, two weeks later offering to replace the   CD’s and finally providing some fixes that have drawn additional criticism from computer experts.

What does this mega consumer confidence buster mean for a recording industry already reeling from declining sales and ill-advised P2P related lawsuits of average consumers?  It’s certainly not good news particularly just as the industry hoped for a much needed holiday sales boost.

"Right here before the "make or break" time of the year the customer base is given a huge reason to be paranoid and choose another gift for their cousin." stated Coalition Of Independent Music Stores head Dan vanCleave in the groups weekly public newsletter. "I mean lets sue them all and then spy on them with software that we put on their hard drives. Or better yet, lets just destroy all of the hard drives and our problems will disappear like magic."