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TomTom Admits Satnav Device Infected With Virus
miserableles writes "TomTom has admitted to a UK security journalist that a number of GO 910 satellite navigation units shipped with two Trojans installed on the hard drive. But still no sign of an official warning on the TomTom website."
my GPS keeps leading me to a discount Viagra/Rolex Watch warehouse/stock broker!
your computer. So essentially this is a dead virus.
Of course no warnings. Warnings only come out after the lawyers are consulted. One must, after all, get one's priorities straight.
If people would be willing to sue via Computer Hacking laws against Tom Tom? If not have it a tort case, why not make it a criminal case? The fact that they knew about it, and covered it up shows guilt.
These devices are going for ~540$ and with installed viruses to boot. Nice.
Tom Tom, should I send $20,000 to Sebo in Nigeria?
The first link, the letter from tomtom, does refer users to a couple free antivirus removal tools that will remove the virus, but other than that, I wonder how much responsibility tomtom will take for getting their customers' PCs infected? If you are a businessman and have taken your tomtom into work and connected to the local network to update your maps for your scheduled sales calls and have now infected the entire company network with viruses, I wonder how much of a problem this will cause and what tomtom would do about it? "Sorry sucker, thanks for purchasing our product, please come again."
I am also a little interested in seeing how tomtom follows this up. There was a report a few months ago about a few ipods shipping with something nasty, and Apple tracked them down all the way to the imaging workstation that started the outbreak. Judging by how tomtom is trying to sweep this one under the rug, I rather doubt they are exercising due diligence. At the very least someone should get fired - either the yutz that violated company policy and brought in his flash drive etc, or the director that didn't have any policies in place to start with. More than likely both are at fault but the guy with the flash drive will wind up taking the fall.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
What a coincidence, so do they!
Linux
-Daniel
KD5UZZ
www.w5yj.org
my GPS keeps leading me to a discount Viagra/Rolex Watch warehouse/stock broker!
Really? Mine just leads me to h0t s3xy s!uts. Which is entirely fine with me.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Tom Tom, can i SYN flood across the atlantic trunk? Tom Tom, DDoS Amazon. Tom Tom, spam 4million email addresses.
As someone else noted, it runs Linux. So the virus really is just on the hard drive, so it can execute on computers that attach to the unit, but the virus doesn't actually execute on the GPS unit.
At a forum for tomtom help at http://www.expansys.com/ft.aspx?i=112333&thread=27 96, a user asks,
this is my first post, when trying to download the map of western europe v6.6 direct from TomTom Home site to my PC the following message appears '' an error occurred while dowloading this file: read error., followed by the options ''continue'' or ''cancel.
Can anyone help me with this problem?
His first reply:
Disable your firewall and anti virus and see if that helps.
Silly windows users.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
it's irrelevant to the case in point, as it can act as usb mass storage and thus be carrying infected files.
actually, it's running linux - tomtom's gpl page. Also take not of OpenTom, a team of 3rd party tomtom hackers.
The server that controls the virus will be called "Ground Control".
I've been a happy owner of a TomTom 300 for a couple of years. It's a dashboard-mounted Linux-based satnav system. When I went shopping for a device like this several years ago I was impressed by the TomTom's UI & audio quality, both more important to me when using it then lots of rarely used features.
For those who don't understand why anyone would want a satnav system, its been a huge benefit to me. Not only does it guide me point to point, particularly when it's to or from a point I'm not familiar with, it also informs me of services near me. For example the other night I met friends at a cinema I'd never been to before. I was able to quickly navigate to it without having to refer to a printed Google map. After the show we were able to quickly chose nearby restaurant without having to roam around in a convoy. I was then able to simply chose "Home" as the destination from my new location. On the way home I was low on fuel; with the TomTom I was able to skip the first exit promising gas (the TomTom showed it was actually a mile away) and continue to the next exit, with 2 gas stations conveniently by the exits.
TomTom Corp.is out of Belgium, which is reflected in their multilingual features & mapsets. They've been fairly hacker friendly and there are a number of 3rd party addon packages that have shown up over the years. TomTom has a history of hiring those hackers and bringing them in-house.
Their software runs on both Linux & Windows CE. Indeed from what I've seen it is fairly agnostic about either platform and offers the same feature sets on both. They also have a free desktop application for adding & removing maps, updating firmware & software, adding custom voices, etc. This started out on MS Windows and is now also offered on MacOS X.
So far I've been extremely happy with my purchase. The biggest problem has been significant highway construction; my maps are now several years old and don't reflect current routes. However TomTom has recently announced updated maps which I'll be purchasing. My only concern is they issued a press release touting a significant discount for the introduction of these maps, a press release which has since disappeared from their website.
In the years since my model 300 shipped they've now added models with built-in hard drives, Bluetooth for integration with phones, radios, car services like headlights, and via phones downloading traffic updates for dynamic route optimization. This hard drive is apparently what has been affected.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Disclaimer: I work for TomTom. Please note that www.tomtomgo910.co.uk is not the official TomTom website. It seems to be a landing page for easydevices.co.uk since the 'order now' links points to there. The official site can be found here: http://www.tomtom.com/
I'm thinking maybe an alien infected the GPS satellite as revenge for Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith infecting the mother ship. Or maybe it's running on Vista.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
It's not new to you because of where you live. In the US, it's still something of a big deal to have a car with nav. (I suspect less than 10% of cars actually on the road here have it built-in). It wasn't an option when I bought my car, and in fact my parents' new car from the same line is our family's first to have it.
How come positive reviews of products are given such a suspicious eye, that even when the post is from a four-digit ID with a long posting history (and website you can visit to check his credentials), it's seen as astroturfing?
Get a grip, guys.
Get off my launchpad!