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Malware Distribution Through Physical Media a Growing Concern
twitter brings us a story about the increasing number of digital devices reaching consumers with malware already installed. In this case, digital photo frames from three different Sam's Club stores were found to contain the same type of malicious code. We discussed a similar problem with iPods a while back, as well as a more recent situation with Maxtor hard drives. Quoting the Register:
"While a compromise at the manufacturer is the most likely scenario, ISC's Sachs also pointed to retailers as a possible point of infection. Returned products, which could have been infected by the consumer, are frequently put back on the shelf, if they are in sale-able condition, and attackers could take advantage of a store's poor digital hygiene, he said. 'Trying to (infect a product) all the way back at the factory — getting it through all the checks and balances — would be pretty hard to do,' he said. 'But doing it at the store, where there might be loose return policies, and (where) they put it back on the shelf - you are not going to get a million infections, but you might get a person from an investment bank next door.'"
These days, it's really only a problem if you use Windows. Those of us using Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, and other non-Windows operating systems have little to worry about.
Now, someday this may start to affect other, non-Windows operating systems. But in many ways I don't think it will be as much of an issue, because many of the alternative OSes have a far more sensible security model than that of Windows. So what easily causes problems with Windows has little to no effect on Solaris, Linux or OpenBSD.
Trying to (infect a product) all the way back at the factory - getting it through all the checks and balances
... well. This whole scenario is hardly surprising.
Apparently this guy has never worked in a production firmware environment before: there are fewer checks and balances than you might think, especially because embedded-system guys generally don't have much awareness of Windows malware issues. Unfortunately, more and more embedded devices are being plugged into desktop machines, and with auto-run enabled
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I've always said that autoexecuting stuff on any media inserted was the stupidest feature ever created. It's just asking for viruses to be installed. Actually strike that. It's the second stupidest thing. The stupidest thing is Windows being configured by default to restart for updates after the user doesn't respond for some very short amount of time.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I bought a new 80386 (maybe a 486 - I forget) motherboard a long time ago and it had a 5 1/4 floppy disk included with the board drivers software. It was also infected with the Michaelangelo virus. I never knew it until I saw a message on the FIDOnet BBS from some idiot in Bulgaria talking about how his virus was coming and it was going to kill everyone's computers.
I downloaded a free copy of McAffee and it found the virus on my computer as well as every floppy that I had inserted since then that wasn't write protected. McAfee's software offered to clean it but all it did was wipe out the MBR making it where I had to reformat and reinstall everything.
I told a friend at school who had just bought a similar motherboard. He broke the seal on his driver disk, scanned it, and found the virus there too. It was coming from the factory infected.
That was a lesson I will never forget and it happened almost 20 years ago.