After the Sony rootkit fiasco, you'd think that companies
would have learned their lesson involving dangerous copy protection methods.
Well according to some rather alarming news from cdfreaks.com, it appears that
Starforce is following in the footsteps of the Sony’s now famous rootkit.
According to cdfreaks.com the anti-piracy system that Starforce is using installs
a driver that runs at the highest level of access on the system. Meaning that
this driver has access to basically all same things the operating system itself
enjoys (hardware/drivers/processes). Further more this driver runs all the
time, regardless of whether or not you are playing a game that used Starforce's DRM. If that wasn't
enough to scare you, if the Starforce driver
thinks it has detected suspicious activity relating to disc copying
the driver will instantly reboot your computer without any notification.
Aside from restarting your computer whenever the driver thinks it detects suspicious
activity, the Starforce driver can also interfere with certain device drivers. In fact it can
interfere so bad that the device drivers will run in legacy PIO mode instead of
DMA, this not only slows down you computer but also slows down the data
transfer to affected hardware. As with the Sony rootkit, this Starforce driver
will only install under Administrator privileges.
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