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Those two things are equivalent.

I don't agree. The OP makes it sound like it's a malicious backdoor installed by Ubisoft to get superuser access to a system. In fact, it's just a badly programmed way to launch games / any executable. To do anything else, you will have to find a way around the other security mechanisms, such as UAC.

I am in no way trying to say that this can not be dangerous, but it's different from what we would usually call rootkits.

You can run a cmd without prompting the UAC you know... or worse... a PowerShell. You know powershell can do a lot of horrible things to your computer with not a single UAC prompt.

For instance, the remove-item commandlet, its description goes like this "The Remove-Item cmdlet does exactly what the name implies: it enables you to get rid of things once and for all. Tired of the file C:\Scripts\Test.txt? Then delete it"[1]. No UAC prompt. Bingo, let's start erasing this annoying C:\Users\Username\Documents.

And this is only one example, give me 1 hour and I can find several ways to fuck up your computer with a powershell open :-).

[1] http://technet.microsoft.com/library/ee176938.aspx

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