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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If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?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.
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.