XCP or Extended Copy Protection is a special software module to protect Audio CD piracy. It was introduced by Fortium Technologies and Sony BMG adapted this technology commercially on their CDs in 2005. But just after few months Mark Russinovich discovered that this XCP installs a rootkit on Windows and that creates vulnerabilities for other malware programs. This technology often used by hackers and several investigation forced Sony to discontinue this feature with their CDs. Basically it installs a CDROM filter driver and whenever you attempt to run this audio CD other than the inbuilt audio player (included with XCP audio CD) it will generate random noise so that you can’t listen any music.

Later Sony launches an ActiveX component on their website to remove all vulnerabilities generated by XCP. After this security agencies followed this issue and few antivirus companies marked XCP as both trojan and rootkit. As a result many legal cases were filed against Sony BMG and Fortium Technologies (previously known as First 4 Internet).

You can see the rootkit analysis of Mark Russinovich here. If you are affected with this rootkit, then you can remove it from your system easily by following simple steps as mentioned below.

First of all you need to delete rootkit’s registry entries so it will not start again when Windows starts.

• Go to Start Menu > Run and type “regedit” [without quotes]
• Now on the Registry Editor, search for “$sys$aries” and delete all entries. You should repeat this by pressing F3 and continue until it says no entries found.
• Now just shut your system down and start it again.
• Next go to Search and find “$sys$*.*” It will bring all files starting with “$sys$”, just delete all files.

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