Electronic gadgets latest sources of computer viruses

[Noreen]

Copied from American forum.

From iPods to navigation systems, some of today's hottest gadgets are landing on store shelves with some unwanted extras from the factory: pre-installed viruses that steal passwords, open doors for hackers and make computers spew spam................

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/ptech/03/13/factory.installed.virus.ap/index.html

[Rik]

Oh joy, yet another security issue to worry about. I can see it reaching a point where we all keep a sacrificial machine to plug these devices into the check them.

[Sebby]

How can we be sure we can trust that machine, though, Rik? 

[kinmel]

How can we be sure we can trust that machine, though, Rik? 

I like it, my kind of thinking - true paranoia 

[Rik]

How can we be sure we can trust that machine, though, Rik? 

We don't. Once we've tested the gadgets, we re-install a clean copy of Windows again!

[Simon]

I wonder how this stands legally?  Say you installed a gadget, which infected your machine to the point of the loss of valuable or secure data?  Could you claim against the manufacturer?

[Rik]

No, in the UK, the claim would be against the retailer - they would, in turn, claim against the wholesaler etc. The claim could certainly be made, though, it would be the proof that would be difficult.

[madasahatter]

I would have thought that proving it was down to that particular gadget could be nigh on impossible.

[Rik]

It might be forensically possible, but hard to find a specialist to do it, and expensive. If it's going to happen, though, it will be in America.

[Simon]

Presumably, if a gadget infected one machine, it would infect another, so surely, the proof would be simply plugging it into a test machine?

[Rik]

Except that, if you had already plugged it into a machine, it could have been infected by that machine. We're almost reaching the realms of having certified sterile machines in libraries, say, and having to open and connect the device in the presence of a witness. Oy!

[Sebby]

The moral of the story is not to trust anything! 

[madasahatter]

The moral of the story is not to trust anything! 

Trouble with that is that if you didn't trust anything, you'd never buy or do anything - and where would we be without all these wonderful gadgets in our lives? 8)

[Rik]

It's quite alarming, when you think about the number of devices which we tend to have these days. We are getting to the point where viruses etc can be delivered by plugging something into a computer. Oh, hang on, that used to be how we got viruses from floppy disks.

[Sebby]

This is true. I'm quite a trusting person when it comes to gadgets, but I know there is a potential out there for attacks, as we've seen with something as common as iPods, which were shipped with a virus.