Stories about: Winternals Software

More than two years after a security researcher first called attention to Sony BMG's use of a stealth program to enforce digital rights management on its music CDs, the company reached a deal with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over the incident, the FTC announced on Tuesday.

Mark Russinovich couldn't understand how the rootkit had sneaked onto his system. An expert on the internals of the Windows operating system, he was careful when it came to computer security and generally had a pretty good idea of what was running on his PC at any given time. And yet the security tool he was using to check his PC was pretty clear: It had found the "rootkit" cloaking software typically used by virus and spyware writers.