In 2007, U.S. In the event you loved this post and you wish to receive more details concerning decoration paper (www.inventables.com) i implore you to visit our own site. officials recalled melamine-laced pet food that caused the deaths of cats and canine and lead-coated toys that endangered toddlers. Now, digital picture frames contaminated with computer viruses are the latest problem import from China.
“That phenomenon apparently has bled over to the digital side as nicely,” Marcus Sachs, director of the Internet Storm Center at the SANS Institute (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security), stated of the Chinese manufacturing problems that get exported. “Essentially, it’s a provide chain downside. We’ve turn into dependent on an affordable source popping out of Asia.”
The offender is believed to be poor quality-assurance testing procedures by which one of each 1,000 or so devices is plucked off an assembly line and examined on a computer that’s infected with a virus, he stated.
Before Christmas, Samsung and Amazon issued alerts warning clients that some Photo Frame Driver CDs for Samsung’s SPF line of digital photo frames contained a virus within the body supervisor software. Customer PCs operating Windows XP are prone to being infected by the virus, W32.Sality.AE, which drops a keylogger or backdoor onto the system.
Element and Mercury model frames sold at Circuit City and Wal-Mart, respectively, additionally had been reported to be contaminated, in accordance with the San Francisco Chronicle.
Sales of digital picture body are increasing and Chinese suppliers produced more than 8 million in 2007, in line with MarketResearch.com. Their plug-and-play use and the truth that they serve as a digital substitute for furniture paper albums make electronic picture frames standard vacation gifts.
A year in the past, Insignia digital picture frames have been pulled from shelves and online sites after Best Buy realized they could possibly be carrying a virus. Also reported to be contaminated then had been digital frames from Advanced Design System, Digital Spectrum, and Castleton. But digital frames aren’t the only electronic gadgets discovered to carry a hidden payload. Other malware-contaminated units have included MP3-enjoying sunglasses, a flip video digicam, and Maxtor exterior arduous drives, in accordance with the SANS Internet Storm Center.
“Anything that has flash storage or bootable storage is exposed to this sort of menace,” stated Dave Marcus, director of safety analysis for McAfee Avert Labs. “It doesn’t suggest you should not purchase them. It is best to just realize earlier than you plug it in that you just would possibly need to disable the Windows auto-boot functionality and run an antivirus scan on it, simply to be safe.”
As an illustration, the ubiquity and comfort of USB thumb drives make them a rising propagation vector. A virus outbreak on a U.S. Department of Defense network prompted officials to briefly ban the use USB drives, CDs and removable storage gadgets in November.
Security Web site Attrition.org maintains a listing of products shipped to customers that were found to be contaminated with viruses and different malicious or odd applications. The list, which fits back to 1990, features a credit card terminal that contained a bug to steal bank card information, MP3 gamers, USB drives, and different onerous drives with pc worms, and a Cisco VPN Client CD that had MP3s of Mexican drug-runner folks music often known as “Narcocorridos,” all in 2008. Then there are the infamous Video iPods that shipped in 2006 with a Windows virus. (And simply final April, a colleague purchased a re-conditioned iPod Nano that arrived with a virus.)
“This listing isn’t complete, yet it ought to make you understand that nothing is secure,” the Attrition.org site says in a cynical warning. “Each piece of electronics you purchase and every bit of software you set up might include malware pre-installed. Rather than manufacturers introducing a better set of high quality controls to prevent such incidents, we are going to no doubt see corporations produce new products that will help keep you ‘secure’ from such threats. These ‘controls’ would no-doubt be one other band-assist on prime of band-aids that make up a lucrative market, which is unhappy commentary about how customers perceive and receive ‘digital safety.'”
The problem is getting critical sufficient to merit congressional hearings on how to guard shoppers in opposition to getting harmed from the electronic products they purchase, said Sachs of the SANS Internet storm.
Right now one of the best safety towards being infected by viruses in new devices is to maintain antivirus software program up to date, and disable Windows’ AutoRun features and instead manually launch packages and installers when units are inserted. The CERT security analysis group has extra information on the dangers associated with AutoRun on its Web site.