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.

VB100

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

Tags:    del.icio.us  digg this! digg this

Quick Links



Poll

When do you install software updates?
As soon as they are released
As soon as I have some time
I take my time, but I always install them eventually
Only when I feel it is absolutely necessary
Never
Leave a comment
View 12 comments

Jobs Career Sidebar

Twitter Feed

virusbtn: RT @emailsecmatters: The typical spam message has sources as diverse as the spam lunch meat: http://ht.ly/2yucd
2 hours ago


virusbtn: Can anyone write a rap about our RAP tests (http://bit.ly/255ySQ) and submit it to the Symantec competition http://bit.ly/bOJg8r
6 hours ago


VB2010

VB2010 VB2010 will take place 29 September - 1 October 2009 at the Westin Bayshore, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Virus Bulletin currently has 208,232 registered users.