This Christmas my daughter got a Fisher-Price Kid Tough digital camera from a relative. It’s an adorable pink camera of modest resolution with a USB cable to use for downloading the pictures to your computer.
And it comes with a free virus! Yay!
Fortunately, my anti-virus software instantly detected the malware and quarantined it. And I long ago disabled all Auto Run support in Windows. If I hadn’t, the virus may have actually been able to run briefly. Malware needs only seconds to wreak havoc. In this case, it was a worm that installs backdoors, probably to open up a PC for eventual induction into a botnet.
Attempts to contact Fisher-Price (or rather Mattel) have been fruitless, but I suspect this is a case of the factory where they were being made using a crappy, infected PC for doing quality assurance checks. Other possibilities that come to mind are disgruntled factory workers, or even an organized attempt to increase the size of a botnet. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility a criminal organization is paying off workers in factories to infect the devices being distributed.
Fortunately, all I had to do was format the flash drive and my daughter can go back to taking insanely large number of pictures of her toys.
