Virus rentals

Hi all. About 3 weeks ago I had a report cross my desk that said that consumers are renting DVDs from places like Blockbuster and Netflix, taking them home and watching them on DVDRoms, and then their comps crash because of a virus. Apparently there had been cases of people encoding a virus on a line of information on some DVDs and this virus will destroy a harddrive. Now, I've been researching this with my tech department and we've been unable to find any way that a comp virus could be encoded onto a DVD because the two systems use different types of info encoding, among other reasons...but this doesn't mean that it hasn't happened. It's possible that someone found a way that I've yet to know about. I'm wondering if anyone has come across anything if they rent DVDs. Also, does anyone know of a technical aspect that could make this encoding possible that I'm overlooking. I've pretty much exhausted my resources, but I still have a few digital manufacturers that haven't responded to my inquiries from work. Any ideas folks? Thanks.

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Wow, that's surprising. I suppose you simply not knowing how it can be done is a possibility, but are you sure this is legitimate? It sounds like a chain e-mail to me: it alerts you to some "virus problem" you probably didn't think of, and it involves a new, cool technology.

Well not that I have ever used it or anything, but there are certain utilities you can use to decode a DVD to AVI format and then compress it into MPEG format. Ripping the DVD basically. Such a virus could be a way to stop this. I'm thinking if someone were to try to rip it to their hard drive, the virus would be unleashed. I don't know though. But if your researching it or what not, some apps to do so are DVD2MPEG, and Flask. Now Flask just allows to rip straight to AVI with sound and all, but FlaskMpegDeCss will do everything in one step. It takes a very LONG time to rip a DVD though, so not sure why people do it.

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Hmmmmmmm, Well i just asked around between some of my friends and in chat rooms i know of that are devoted to ripping dvd's and all that stuff (don't' worry, never done it myself, i'm only 56k so there's no way i can waste 130 hrs d/l a movie like gladiator which is 1.2gb big And they all said this, and i quote...

" yeah you can put a virus on a commercial dvd, just lick it if you have a cold"

but others said more correct answers "No, u cannot add anything to a commercial dvd, only rip it"

So i believe that is just a bogus e-mail. But there could be some seriously extremely small chance that i may be wrong.

-Brian

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See, because of the company I work for and the things we're involved with, I know this report is not false. It's been sent down to me by our corporate headquarters which was sent to them by the "Motherships" of our company one of which is the leading DVD developer/manufacturer in the world and the other is the biggest movie studio in the country. So basically I know that this is legit and could be a major problem. We've already looked into ripping DVDs, but we don't think this is it. We're convinced that someone has managed to construct a DVD virus, but we just can't figure out how or even if it's limited to certain types of DVDs. If I could name who I work for, everyone would understand my problem...lol. But I can't because that could cost me my job. So, I'm sorry everything is so vague, but I'm stuck.

Wow, didn't know this DVD stuff was so top-secret.

I see your problem. Thankfully, most people seem to use players with TVs, rather than computers. Those arn't exposed to the virus, are they?

I asked around and I was told it was possible. That the way it would be done is if you set up the DVD with an autorun cfg, which all already are, but tell this cfg to execute the virus exe. Makes sense to me. Or if it didn't have an autorun and happened while watching the DVD, the software could execute it while searching for a certain scene. It may have been set up in such a way that when you click a certain part, the virus is executed. Thats what I think would work, and thats what I was told would work.

You guys probably already thought about that route though.

Yeah, that's what the general thought was at work too, as far as a virus exe download when a certain feature is activated. The only problem is we don't know if it's encoded on the DVDRom special features that are on DVDs or if it's encoded on the movie itself. The report I received indicated that it might be both. If that's true, this could be a rapidly growing problem. I don't see how it would be something the industry could control though. They already screwed up once with RCE to limit region violations and ended up causing even more incompatible discs. I'll be working 60+ hour weeks trying to get this one figured out. Hopefully, we can isolate the virus to develop ways to prevent any further tampering, but it ain't likely...lol. Cross your fingers for us.

TVs won't have a problem, Chris. The only DVDs that cause problems with TVs are pixal discs and those have been isolated. DVD players are now equipped with chips to show these discs as 'Unable to read disc'. LOL...That was last years problem and we nipped it in the bud.

So am I right in thinking that this virus was created by someone who has the direct ability to? Someone who works there? It reminds me of this thing I saw on Ripleys Believe it or not, scientists who make silicone chips are encoding little pictures on the chips so that when looked at through a certain microscope you can see the pictures. I thought that was kinda cool.

Are you allowed to name the DVDs with this problem, so I can avoid renting them because I use a DVD-ROM. If you can't I understand.

It's more likely that the virus is being created by one or more persons we are renting titles, breaking the encryption, putting a virus on the discs, and returning them to the stores. That's why we're not too optomistic that it's something the industry can stop unless new encoding and encryptions are implemented. So far the virus has just been reported in the New England section of the country on T2, Men In Black (DTS version), and Silence of the Lambs (Criterion Collection version). So far, we've only been notified of about 13 cases...that's why we're starting to check into it now. As soon as we get a dozen reported cases of anything for the same title, we begin to investigate. The main problem is that this type of thing can't be contained to just a few titles. If someone is really doing this, it could be any movie.

I'm going to propose a firmware upgrade at my meeting tomorrow that we can implement into new and existing DVDRoms that will scan for any encryption or encoding breaks. These breaks in encoding patterns would then be recognized as tampering and the disc would not be scanned. This will be a temporary fix, kind of like what we issued for the nationwide problems with The Matrix when it was released. Hopefully it will work well enough until the new 2001 DVDs hit the market, since 98% of these will feature the new RCE encoding. Older titles, however, will still be vulnerable.

Sounds like you're good at what you do. What problem with "The Matrix" are you referring to? I have a copy of that on DVD that I got quite awhile ago, for the day when I buy a DVD player.

At the time of release, The Matrix was incompatible with virtually every player on the market for various reasons. I have a list of about 15 problems with 95% of the players on the market. All these problems forced my company to issue a firmware upgrade statement to most of the player manufacturers in the country. There shouldn't be any new players that still have the problems and every older player can get free upgrades from their manufacturer.

Yikes. Well, I own "The Matrix" on DVD, but no DVD player. I guess this means when I buy one, it will likely be new enough to play the flick anyway?

Yeah, you should be fine. Even if you buy an older generation player, you can still get the free firmware upgrade that would be necessary.

Have you guys solved this problem? I'm assuming you have by now.

Yeah we solved the problem thanks to the FBI. We were able to track the complaints to a small area of New England and about 6 affected rental stores. We turned our info over to the FBI and they nabbed 4 college-aged guys that had managed to 'bug' about 100 titles. Each one got a $250,000 fine and five years in jail per title. New tech is now in place that will prevent this in the future.

damn