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

Re:Had to be done

[Calydor]

People aren't whining about Capcom trying to stop cheating from happening.

People are rightly complaining that Capcom's attempt to stop cheating from happening placed your computer one step away from being part of a botnet or worse.

Don't buy uncracked software

[Anonymous Coward]

Cracked software is the only software that has been given an independent in-depth review of its security measures. Buying uncracked software opens your computer to every malice the original author has stooped to in order to seize control of your computer.

And more often than not, the EULA makes it rather hard to get legal recourse for damage intentionally done to your computer. In contrast, a cracker inserting malicious code may go to jail for it.

I'd have liked to finish off this posting with "/s" but there really is no suitable placement for the starting sarcasm tag.

Re:Who decides that

[gweihir]

I doubt that. Massive screw-ups like these are usually a team effort. You know, "engineers" that cannot explain the feature well or do not really understand it themselves, "managers" that make decisions without a clue about what they decide on, and so on. I have seen this numerous times in action. It is really quite fascinating to watch how dysfunctional most/all corporate decision-making processes are in large corporations.