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Walmart Photo Keychain Comes Preloaded With Malware
Blowit writes "With the Christmas holidays just past and opening up your electronic presents may get you all excited, but not for a selected lot of people who got the Mercury 1.5" Digital Photo Frame from Walmart (or other stores). My father-in-law attached the device to his computer and his Trend Micro Anti-virus screamed that a virus is on the device. I scanned the one I have and AVAST did not find any virus ... So I went to Virscan.org to see which vendors found what, and the results are here and here." Update: 12/29 05:44 GMT by T : The joy is even more widespread; MojoKid points out that some larger digital photo frames have been delivered similarly infected this year, specifically Samsung's SPF-85H 8-inch digital photo frame, sold through Amazon among other vendors, which arrived with "W32.Sality.AE worm on the installation disc for
Samsung Frame Manager XP Version 1.08, which is needed for using the SPF-85H as a USB monitor." Though Amazon was honest enough to issue an alert, that alert offers no reason to think that only Amazon's stock was affected.
This is old news. It has happened before. Case and Point.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
Write them a letter telling them what you found. Try this link http://walmartstores.com/contactus/feedback.aspx to get to their headquarters, where something might get done about it. Include enough technical detail for them to replicate the problem, especially the model number or any other identifying information from the package.
If you want someone to care enough to write back, try to not sound accusatory or threaten to sue them. I'm sure they get enough of that on a daily basis.
John
Looks to me like they used some kind of packer to make the exe's small to not take up a lot of space on the device (understandably). A lot of scanners will automatically detect packing as malware and, due to the nature of how a packer works, trojan is the logical choice. I have a similar problem with anything I compile with delphi since a lot of malware is developed in delphi.
My 2 cents worth...
It's not a virus, it's just a exe packer they used.
Virus scanners have been labeling PE Packers as viruses for ages now, simply because a virus could be packed with them, and it's easier to pick out a packer header than a virus contained in it.
A lot of false positives are caused by this, and this looks like one of those cases based on what you linked. "Generic" "NSPack" "PossibleThreat" in the VirSCAN links give that away.
EXE/PE Packers simply compress a binary and decompress it on the fly, simply to save space or "load faster". Likely Walmart's programmers used one to keep the app's size small on a small device like that.
I've dealt with this situation in size-coding competitions before, and it's not fun. A lot of false positives are caused simply because a packer was used.
Fortunately, some of the better virus scaners actually unpack the software before checking it, or look for valid virus signatures instead of a simple Packer.
This basically is just a case of virus scan companies being lazy.
Christmas is a twelve day feast that starts on Dec 25, and doesn't let up until Epiphany.
Perhaps where you live, but for others Christmas starts on Dec 24.
Viruses exploiting the AutoPlay is nothing new and going wild. The other day I went to a printing shop with stuff I was going to print stored on a USB stick. I plugged it in the Windows box at the shop and it got infected. Three "folder" icons appeared in the Windows file manager but they were not directories -- they were trojan executables with the icons identical to the default one for directories. They all ended in .exe but the Windows file manager hid the extension part of filename by default so a careless use couldn't tell that from a directory. Also the "autorun.inf" was clearly modified to point to the malware (written in plain text).
I was not infected because my machine is a Linux one and I know these malware tricks well, but I can imagine how many customers of that shop are tricked to click on the trojan program.
Autorun is evil. It is so vulnerable to exploitation and of little use and it's enabled by default on Windows. Sadly, the GNOME team, who's goal is to copy every mistake done by Microsoft, choose to mount removable media automatically by default. What's their next quest? Certified malware-to-malware compatibility?
Luckily I ditched GNOME long ago.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
For Windows XP, SP2 ... Tweak UI allows disabling of AutoPlay either by device type (eg CD) or drive letter, and the setting is stored in the user registery under [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer], but Tweak UI only shows the settings if the user is an Administrator.
However according to Microsoft's TechNet web-site, the NoDriveTypeAutoRun setting in HKCU is ignored if there is a corresponding entry in HKLM, so to disable AutoPlay on all drive types for all users:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer]
"NoDriveTypeAutoRun"=dword:000000ff
If AutoPlay is enabled, actions per content type can be set per user by right-clicking the drive in Explorer, then selecting the AutoPlay tab. The options are stored in [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\AutoplayHandlers\UserChosenExecuteHandlers]. The default (which is to prompt the user) can be restored by deleting the entries.
Note that there doesn't appear to be an option for "data only". So far as I know, if AutoPlay is enabled (which it is by default), you can't disable AutoRun.inf. However, if the user is not an administrator, Explorer will prompt for an Administrator logon before doing anything.
All sounds to me that the Walmart photo frame may be truly infected. Interesting to see if a re-scan gives the same results, after AV signature updates.
To identify my photo frame, it has USB vendor code 1908:1320, and gives dmesg output as
and has files on it
Hey, I always stick odd USB devices into Linux first to check them out.
For background info, this photo frame does nothing when first connected. You can set it to "transfer" mode, at which point it emulates a USB CD-ROM of 304 Kbyte size. That CD image tries to autorun the DPFmate software to compress and transfer images to the device. The photos are *not* visible on the device through normal access, must have transferred them to a hidden area. I'd be interested if anyone has more info on the USB protocols used.
Andrew Yeomans