Spanish security company Panda Software warned earlier this week that several companies are apparently using Microsoft Media Player’s digital rights management (DRM) tool to fool people into downloading spyware and viruses. The existence of the files was confirmed by Harvard researcher Ben Edelman.

Microsoft responded Friday, saying that the security risk does not arise from a flaw in its rights management tool, although the issue is triggered by an apparently content-protected file. Content distributors can use Windows Media Player to pop up a Web page with information about a video or song, and in this case, that page was apparently loaded with automatic spyware download mechanisms.

The automatic downloads would be blocked on any computer running the Service Pack 2 release of Windows, Microsoft representatives said. People can also protect PCs running older versions of the operating system by turning up the security settings in Internet Explorer to “high,” they added.

“There is no way to automatically force the user to run the malicious software,” Microsoft said in an e-mailed statement. “This function is not a security vulnerability in Windows Media Player or DRM.”

Source: News.com