Privacy Digest

Malware hitches a ride on digital devices - Via The Register(UK):

It's time to add digital picture frames to the group of consumer products that could carry computer viruses and Trojan horse programs.

In the past month, at least three consumers have reported that photo frames - small flat-panel displays for displaying digital images - received over the holidays attempted to install malicious code on their computer systems, according to the Internet Storm Center, a network-threat monitoring group. Each case involved the same product and the same chain of stores, suggesting that the electronic systems were infected at the factory or somewhere during shipping, said Marcus Sachs, who volunteers as the director of the Internet Storm Center.

"When (the first incident) pops up, we thought it might be someone that was infected and blamed it on the digital picture frame," Sachs said. "But this is malware - and malware that does not seem to be very well detected. You could plug in a device and infect yourself with something that you would never know you had."

The incidents underscore that the proliferation of electronic devices with onboard memory means that consumers have to increasingly be aware of the danger of unwanted code hitching a ride. While many consumers are already wary of certain devices, such as digital music players, USB memory sticks and external hard drives, that include onboard memory, other types of electronics have largely escaped scrutiny.

In the past, consumer devices infected with malicious code have generally been the result of manufacturing mishaps. In October 2007, for example, hard-disk drive maker Seagate acknowledged that a password-stealing Trojan horse program had infected a number of its disk drives shipped from a factory in China after a computer at the manufacturing facility was infected. The Trojan horse would infect systems and attempt to steal the account credentials to Chinese online games as well as the popular World of Warcraft.

(Read Original Article - Via The Register(UK).)