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Olympus Digital Camera Ships With a Worm

Posted by kdawson on from the do-not-get-too-close-to-the-viewfinder dept.

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."

4 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. Intentional or accidental? by Nemilar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I hate to ask the obvious question, but the article doesn't address it -- could this be intentional, or is it accidental?

    I would imagine that some shady overboss would be willing to pay a relatively sizable amount of money (especially considering that the amount of money you'd have to pay someone in a Chinese factory to do this would not be very high) for the opportunity to infect potentially tens of thousands of computers.

    --
    Nemilar http://www.techthrob.com - Visit Me!
  2. Re:With offshoring as it is... by hedwards · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The problem there is that I don't think Japanese workers are any cheaper than American ones are. And in order to actually get any cost savings you have to overlook precautions and externalities. If you don't do that the price of production tends to be about the same no matter where you choose to fabricate the items.

  3. Re:Autorun?! by bragr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    At the single biggest security problem at the place were I work. We tried disabling it, but we had too many problems of people putting in flash drives or cd and the stupid flash based window not popping up like it did "on their home computer" and that "their computer was broken." Sometimes, its just easier to clean up afterwards, then to preempt it and deal with people complaining.

  4. But Sony said to run it by linebackn · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "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"

    But what if that malware, as it seemingly often is these days, is an actual intentional part of a product?