So now Sony has apologized for the rootkit fiasco involving its CDs, which the Northern Star wrote about last week.

As if that makes everything OK. Apologies coming from giant corporations have to be taken with several thousand grains of salt.

The fact Sony bundled what amounted to illegal spyware with its CDs is only part of what should be seen as a much larger problem.

The rootkit Sony used on its CDs, many of them available since mid-2004, is a malicious piece of spyware.

While Sony offered an uninstall option on the program, a user must know the program exists in order to uninstall it. Rootkit programs hide themselves from the user.

Meanwhile, the major spyware protection firms, including Microsoft, whose patches are downloadable via the internet, balked on stopping this program which, had it not been of Sony origin, would have been regarded as spyware instantly.

In fact, according to an article in Information Week, a trade publication distributed to more than 440,000 business technology professionals, Microsoft didn’t decide to act until at least Nov. 12.

It was then that Jason Garms, the group program manager for Microsoft’s anti-malware team, stated on his blog, “We have analyzed this software, and have determined that in order to help protect our customers we will add a detection and removal signature for the rootkit component of the XCP software to the Windows anti-spyware beta.”

Nice work by Garms, but it’s about a year and a half too late.

Consumers should be up in arms about this. If we cannot expect companies who say they will attempt to protect us from malware in cyberspace and on PCs then what is their purpose for existing?

One would think that companies and sections of companies that specifically deal with security concerns would react accordingly regardless of the source of the potential malware.

In other words, whether Sony or Joe Blow is responsible, these companies – this means you, Microsoft – have shirked their responsibility to consumers.

Now, boycott-Sony blogs are appearing around the Internet and lawsuits aimed at Sony were flying fast and furious in recent weeks.

Maybe it takes boycotts in order for corporations to realize they absolutely depend on the consumer to function.

It should be interesting to see if Microsoft sees a similar fallout in consumers switching to Linux, which was not vulnerable to Sony’s rootkit, or to Macs which were also less vulnerable than PCs with Windows.

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