The Hidden Risks of Demo Discs

The Hidden Risks of Demo Discs :
“In mid-November, members of Sony's PlayStation Underground received the Holiday Demo Disc and discovered that after executing one of the game demos on the disc, their PS2 memory cards were completely erased. While that doesn't mean much to nongamers, for anyone who has spent 40-plus hours building a character in a role-playing game or playing through a season of football—well, it's a huge boot in the trousers.

The sampler disc was sent via mail to members of the PlayStation Underground, an opt-in promotional group that Sony calls a ‘personal link to all the insider info from the PlayStation world.’”

There's more to the story than a handful of gamers losing their saved game files. The implications of such a glitch can be huge, especially as consumers start to set up networked computing systems in their homes, complete with routers, networks and servers. Minus cubicles and a water cooler, it's the equivalent of a small enterprise network.

Rick Fleming, chief technology officer at Digital Defense Inc., said that although most consumers don't realize it, game consoles are computers that run off their own proprietary operating systems. As a result, a bug in a demo CD, CD-ROM or DVD-ROM could affect the rest of a home network and spread to an enterprise network through a VPN connection or portable storage devices.

"PlayStation and Xbox are being networked with home computers … so I can easily see how something like that would spread across a network," Fleming said. "Every time you connect to something else, there's another opportunity for something to go wrong."

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