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Olympus Digital Camera Ships With a Worm
An anonymous reader writes "Olympus Japan has issued a warning to customers who have bought its Stylus Tough 6010 digital compact camera that it comes with an unexpected extra — a virus on its internal memory card. The Autorun worm cannot infect the camera itself, but if it is plugged into a Windows computer's USB port, it can copy itself onto the PC, then subsequently infect any attached USB device. Olympus says it 'humbly apologizes' for the incident, which is believed to have affected some 1,700 units. The company said it will make every effort to improve its quality control procedures in future. Security company Sophos says that more companies need to wake up to the need for better quality control to ensure that they don't ship virus-infected gadgets. At the same time, consumers should learn to always ensure Autorun is disabled, and scan any device for malware before they use it on their computer."
Unnecessary unless you use an ancient decade-plus-old Windows version. Vista and 7 stop this attack automatically by displaying the Autoplay dialog when a new device is inserted.
In fact, Windows 7 removes the ability entirely to manually execute Autorun from a flash drive.
These guys are idiots that have no idea what they are talking about. Disabling autorun was the common tech practice back in 2003. One of the most significant features announced by Windows Vista was its intention to interrupt this auto-execution behavior with a pop-up autoplay window. In other words, solved since 2007. It came 10 years too late, but arrived nonetheless.
On a fully secured (DEP, non Admin account, all updates) Windows machine, I can see "quarantined" items which all appear to be "autorun.xxx.worm" , pick anything you like. It is already out of hand.
If something happened like this on Apple OS X land, Apple would roll out an operating system update and disable Autorun. Perhaps, they could show a help document about installing applications with double clicking.
Shrink wrapped/boxed software is _dead_. Even if it is not dead, it is trivial to add the "install software" control panel back. Just a line needed to be on box or "driver cd". That is all. It won't be the first time some convenience is given up for security. How many times people install the same software anyway?
it would be a shame if 30,000 pissed off geeks were to hit it (or do any number of "interesting" things to it)
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I've ran into this worm before (or one like it). One of my clients got an external HDD full of video data. They're into video production (not porn), so often they will require data from their clients. Anyways, this worm hides in a fake Recycle Bin folder which is executed by the autorun.inf file. In turn, the infected PC will replicate to all possible drive letters. Once on a server share, all other clients will soon get infected.
It's real annoying. But if all your PCs and Servers have an up-to-date anti-virus scanner, it they should now all prevent from getting infected.
Life is not for the lazy.
To turn USB autorun off on Windows XP you have to edit the registry. The GUI options do not apply to USB drives for some retarded reason.
I was alerted to this when I bought a USB drive that came with autorunning software (to do encryption and other rubbish) and was surprised that it ran despite me turning autorun off as a part of standard configuration since the late 90's.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
edit: further for completely turning off autorun to be effective you must make sure you have a particular security update installed.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967715
the whole thing is a gigantic mess!
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