Digital Photo Frames Infected With a Trojan Horse

By jessicaf at 12:11 am on January 14, 2008 | 4 Comments

Reports of three photo frames that came infected with a Trojan Horse were received by the Internet Storm Center this Christmas.  The photo frames made by Advanced Design Systems were bought from different Sam’s Club stores.”It propagates to any connected device by copying a script, a com file and an autorun file,” one consumer reported to the ISC. “It hides all systems files and itself while completely eliminating the user admin ability to show hidden files. It creates processes that negate any attempt to go to anti virus and anti spam web sites.  It prevents the remote installation of any antivirus components” (Robert Lemos, Security Focus).

 Both Advanced Design Systems and Sam’s Club representatives could not be reached for comment by Security Focus, but it is suspected that the malware could have come in the manufacturing plant or from frames that were put back on shelves after being infected and returned to the stores.  Often stores do not have very stringent policies on returns and will not know that an electronic has been compromised.  Manufacturing plants can introduce a virus through an infected computer in the plant or perhaps an insider.  Some manufacturers have made efforts to stem this rising trend by making sure all equipment and computers are not attached to any outside network.

This is not the first time that consumer electronics have been infected with malware and viruses.  Anything with on-board memory has the potential to be infected including MP3 players, USB drives, hard drives, and even musical sunglasses.

Some examples of past incidents due to mistakes in manufacturing processes include a hard drive from Seagate in October 2007 and Apple’s iPods in 2006.  The Seagate hard drives had a Trojan horse program that stole account identification and passwords for a Chinese online game.   They had been infected at the manufacturing plant in China because of a computer at the plant that was infected.  The iPods had a Windows virus sneak on board the hard drive.

It is not known whether this most recent attack was a mishap or intentional, but certainly there is a possibility of intentional attacks on consumer electronics.  With the proliferation of personal electronics, this will be an increasing problem in the coming years.

 Lemos, Robert. “Malware Hitches a Ride on Digital Devices,” Security Focus, Jan. 9 2008. http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11499.

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4 Comments

  • 1
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    Comment by Robert

    January 14, 2008 @ 3:27 pm

    I recently purchased the Kodak EasyShare EX811 for my parents. This frame has a wireless connection and can automatically connect to the Internet for picture downloads from the Kodak site. This article makes me curious about just how malicious malware like this can be. These devices are not protected by the suite of security applications that can be installed to a PC yet they are still exposed to the Internet. I find it interesting that something as benevolent as a picture frame can be used as a backdoor into a network or system.

  • 2
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    Comment by Detecting spyware

    January 21, 2008 @ 11:28 am

    I am amazed that a photo frame can be infected with spyware, still I guess if there is some form of windows operating system running then it is vernarable

  • 3
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    Comment by Albert

    January 23, 2008 @ 7:38 am

    The frames, MP3-players, hard-drives etc. aren’t actually “infected” — they don’t run the software themselves. They just contain malicious executables that MS Windows executes automatically. Just like floppy disks used to be infected many years ago.

  • 4
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    Comment by Joshua

    March 4, 2009 @ 10:58 am

    Hi,

    I am looking for a Philips 10FF2CMI digital photo frame but am currently struggling to find one anywhere, or to find anywhere that has a good review. Do you know anywhere you can point me to that will provide one of these please?

    Many thanks

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