Street Fighter V Update Installed Hidden Rootkits on PCs (theregister.co.uk)

Capcom's latest update for Street Fighter V was installing a secret rootkit on PCs. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes The Register: This means malicious software on the system can poke a dodgy driver installed by Street Fighter V to completely take over the Windows machine. Capcom claims it uses the driver to stop players from hacking...to cheat. Unfortunately, the code is so badly designed, it opens up a full-blown local backdoor... it switches off a crucial security defense in the operating system, then runs whatever instructions are given to it by the application, and then switches the protection back on
Friday Capcom tweeted "We are in the process of rolling back the security measures added to the PC version of Street Fighter V." This prompted one user to reply, "literal rootkits are the opposite of security measures."

Comments

This should be the death of Capcom

[Anonymous Coward]

Only a fool would install a game made by them after this.

Re:This should be the death of Capcom

[El Lobo]

You mean, nobody is installing Sony software these days after the rootkit incident 2012? Right.

Re:This should be the death of Capcom

[Opportunist]

You do understand, I hope, that anitivirus and OS can't do jack against something the user wants to install, despite any and all warnings, yes? Which is, by the way, the way it SHOULD be, because the opposite is way worse: The OS deciding what I may and what I may not install on a computer I allegedly own.

Re:This should be the death of Capcom

[Calydor]

You mean like Windows 10 and updates?

Re: This should be the death of Capcom

[GrahamJ]

What's bad is allowing an actor you don't trust to control the software on your machine. That doesn't necessarily preclude operating systems or their developers.

Rootkit x antivirus, same concerns

[hcs_$reboot]

the code is so badly designed, it opens up a full-blown local backdoor

Sounds like antiviruses: they're supposed to fix problems and filter out malware, but such complex software requires excellent optimized algorithms and code, which unfortunately is still due.

Re: Adding Capcom to tech boycott

[Anonymous Coward]

What we need to be doing is getting executives arrested for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That awful law has been used to prosecute hackers and hobbyists for much more minor things than this, and has been twisted enough to fit various cases that there's more than enough precedent now.

Games and OSes

[DrYak]

Because people want to play video games...

Was does Windows have anything to do with couple of thousands games on Steam(*) that all run on any OS (Windows ; Mac OS X ; Linux) ?

Oh, yeah... "Triple-A games".
The kind of overrated content that rarely gets correct ports (Hi, Ryan Gordon, thank you for being the refreshing exception to this sad rule !), and is the most likely to b0rk your machine due to DRM (You know! Because "AAA" development costs a lot of money, and the "AAA" studios have to protect their revenue. By completely fucking the experience of their paying customer base).

If anything, today's DRM example is a big argument of why people should prefer the PirateBay version, and why I've personally downloaded cracks for any DRMed game that I've bought.

----

(*) : I know that Steam also uses some forms of DRM, but we have yet to have a FA on /. titled "Steam's own DRM causes a massive backdoor on all computers"