When Picture Frames Attack

Just spotted this on PC World, old news to those who follow their site daily:

Unfortunately, some frames sold by Best Buy were infected with a Trojan horse. The infected units are all 10.4-inch versions, model number NS-DPF10A under Best Buy's Insignia store brand. If you don't have antivirus software and you've already plugged the frame into your PC, the malware could have spread. See Best Buy Sold Infected Digital Picture Frames for more details and a link to assistance.

That's a problem I hadn't thought of.
A virus in a piece of hardware that you don't think of as a computer on your network.
Cold this also apply to portable USB hard drives, network disk drives, cheap network disk enclosures (sans disk), network media streaming boxes (just add your own HD) ... even to a little USB key chain picture viewer ?
I guess the list is endless.

Just make sure your anti-virus software is up to date !

I had heard about that. Rediculous. I don't know much about these picture frames, so why would a person plug one into their PC? Can't you just copy photos from the PC to a memory card and then put the memory card into the digital frame?

At PMA I saw wireless network attached photoframes, with web interfaces (so they are web servers!) for setup.
These would go grab images off your hard drive across the network and update themselves with more photos !

Imagine a virus getting into a network appliance like that, who has anti-virus software for photo frames ?
The only defence you have is to secure each PC on the network.

Yes, this made big news in the digital frame world. Unfortunately as more USB plug and play devices become common like this, its only going to get worse. People want cheap devices like digital frames so manufacturers leave out things like virus protection software.

The virus could be setup to copy onto the card and then if you have autorun setup for cards to infect your system automatically.

Make sure the virus scanner is up-to-date and checks your cards and turn off autorun even for CD/DVD's/

Roger R.

USB jump drives have got to be a big problem too. You can't really run anti-virus on them as a stand-alone though, you have to run it from your computer.