For those who have yet to hear, Sony’s been up to some crazy business. An attempt to protect itself from casual CDs pirates has resulted in malicious worms being unleashed onto thousands of PCs.

Earlier this month Sony BMG added aggressive copy-protection software on 20 different albums before shipping out tens of thousands of copies. Before being able to play the protected disks on their computers, users had to first install a Sony music player.

What Sony failed to tell users is that the software not only let the company know every time the user played a particular song, but also that the software included a “rootkit” that essentially creates a hidden space on the user computer.

Rootkits were invented by bad hackers to allow them to log into a computer system without the owner knowing, giving the hacker complete computer control. In the hidden space, or rootkit, Sony hid the content protection software so people couldn’t find and delete it. But Sony did not do a very good job, so the hidden space could be used by anyone who knew about it.

Essentially Sony created a massive security hole where virus writers could hide nasty code. And it gets worse. After defending itself by saying it did not even know what a rootkit was, Sony eventually released a patch that turned out to be even more problematic.

The uninstall process required users to provide detailed personal information and when users download it, the uninstall programs installs all sorts of new programs that Sony again did not warn users about.

One such program is called “CodeSupport”. If users go to a “bad” website after installing the patch, a hidden program on the “bad” website is designed to look for CodeSupport and can completely take over the users' computer.

Quite the drama for trying to prevent friends from sharing CDs.

Since all this has gone down at least two Internet worms have been discovered attempting to take advantage of the rootkit and its patch. Analysts predict that over 500,000 computer networks have been affected so far, luckily no incidents have surfaced in Australia.

As a result of all the negative press and flak from customers, Sony will remove the rootkit.