Infested Digital Frames

February 2009

Latest problem import? Infected digital photo frames. Digital photo frames infected with computer viruses are the latest problem import from China. “Essentially, it’s a supply chain problem,” said the director of the Internet Storm Center at the SANS Institute. The culprit is believed to be poor quality-assurance testing procedures in which one of every 1,000 or so devices is plucked off an assembly line and tested on a computer that is infected with a virus, he said. Before Christmas, Samsung and Amazon issued alerts warning customers that some Photo Frame Driver CDs for Samsung’s SPF line of digital photo frames contained a virus in the frame manager software. Customer PCs running Windows XP are at risk of being infected by the virus, W32.Sality.AE, which drops a keylogger or backdoor onto the system. Element and Mercury brand frames sold at Circuit City and Wal-Mart, respectively, also were reported to be infected, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “Anything that has flash storage or bootable storage is exposed to this kind of threat,” said the director of security research for McAfee Avert Labs. “It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy them. You should just realize before you plug it in that you might want to disable the Windows auto-boot functionality and run an antivirus scan on it, just to be safe.”