With EA and Spore - SecuROM was a straight up root kit. Basically malware. Pretty sure on the Sims 2 forums there were people who had their computers bricked. (Sims 2 was already messy enough to reinstall sometimes, EA did lots of weirdness with the registry.)

Sony did something similar with music CD’s. Their elaborate scheme to prevent you from ripping your CD’s more than three times or whatever created a vulnerability that was actively exploited by malware developers.