Fighting malware and spam

MacDonald's serves up spyware

Diners 'rewarded' with infected music players

Japanese customers of global burger giant MacDonald's have been warned that 10,000 MP3 players handed out by the firm as part of a promotion are infected with a data-stealing worm.

The USB-sticks given out to burger buyers were laden with free tunes, but also harboured malware labelled QQPass by Trend Micro, which copies itself to removable drives and harvests confidential data.

MacDonald's has offered replacement spyware-free prizes, and has directed its customers to free clean-up tools provided by Trend. The infected devices were only given away in Japanese branches of the burger chain.

In a similar vein, a small number of Apple's Video iPod media players sold since September appear to be infected with an as-yet unidentified piece of Windows malware. In a press release from Apple, Microsoft are criticised for failing to secure their operating system against such malware, further fuelling the Mac security debate.

19 October 2006

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