Aussie ALDI withdraws infected greybox offering The Australian branch of supermarket chain ALDI has withdrawn a range of hard drives from its stores following the discovery that the hardware was infected with malware. The affected device – a grey-label external 4-in-1 hard drive, DVD, USB and card reader device – has reportedly been pulled from shelves, though it is still …
Clearly I didn't look hard enough last time :-)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/external-DVD%C2%B1RW-Burner-Writer-Luxburg%C2%AE/dp/B005DEVO4O/
It packs the DVD writer, USB hub and multi-card-reader; only difference seems to be that the hard-drive part is a "caddy" (i.e. you have to source your own 2.5" SATA drive). I've seen 500GB 2.5" SATA disks for about £30 on Amazon, so an all-in-one USB storage hub (in both senses of the latter word) for £70 looks very appealing.
Of course, I have no idea how well-built this box is, and/or how it exposes all those USB mass storage devices to the connected computer, but I'm tempted to take a punt on this one sometime... at least I'd have some control over the origin of the HD :-)
Who doesn't format external drives and disable autorun? Everyone.
Well, nearly everyone anyway.
As a matter of course, I do all that, AND I knobble my USB drives so an autorun.inf can't be created just in case I plug into an already infected box. (so I don't further infect anyone in case I don't notice).
When I disable autorun on client's machines, they scream blue bloody murder.
I tell them I did that because they infected my USB drive, (before cleaning off their infection).
They say it's impossible because they have a virus checker installed.
No wonder I resort to the "I don't know, I just work here" philosophy.
We have a batch of USB sticks at work that have a write protect switch. Took us AGES to find some, but we use them both to stop client PCs infecting our sticks and also to prevent client AV software from deleting all our tools we keep on them (mailpassview, some malware removal tools that look suspect to some AVs, etc).
It should be a law that all USB sticks have these switches - 90% of the time when people plug a stick in it's only to read from it anyway.
But look, this is a CONSUMER device sold in a SUPERMARKET FFS
The users will be in two camps:
1 - The geek who gets a cheap external drive and knows full well the dangers
2 - The normal user who sees a bargain and just plugs it in and expects it to work.
So while you can self congratulate all you like, the "avergae" home user buying this stuff from ALDI will just plug it in and trust everything will be OK
This follows the Fission-braded 8GB USB drives, that in reality only stored 1GB or less. Aldi have been selling a lot of dodgy computer kit lately.
In the case of these flash drives, people buy them, load lots of data on them, then wonder why the data reads back corrupt.
In the case of these drives, they'll plug them in and whamo, they're infected.
While yes, the user should format all disks before use, as a matter of course, a lot won't.
I buy loads of food and cleaning products from Aldi, but I wouldn't touch the expensive electronic gear. I did buy the radio-controlled digital clock a couple of years ago, but it was only £4.99, so no worries if it went wrong. It's actually still working! Hard drives I buy only from Amazon or Misco.
Why they don't ship removable disks unformatted anymore(*1).
Back in the old days, the first thing we have to do when we take a new floppy out of the box was to format it. Attempting to use the disk as-is would yield an error about the disk being unreadable. And god help you if your machine had only one floppy drive, and you issued the init or format command and /forgot/ to change the disks before pressing enter or return.
(*1) okay, so you still have to format rewritable optical media if you're going to use it as a Mount Rainier removable disk or something similar. But for flash media and removable hard disks, they're usually pre-formatted, and more irritatingly, sometimes ship with utilities, or even worse, some sort of stupid flash movie that advertises the advantage of the drive, already on the drive.
This is most likely a false positive funny nobody realised it as it is not the first time this happens to Medion/Aldi. The other more interesting question is, why does malware protection software write to the MBR!!!!
[ from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoned_%28computer_virus%29 ]
In 2007, a batch of Medion laptops sold through Aldi chain were found to have the Stoned.Angelina virus already present on the preinstalled Windows Vista operating system.[8]
Medion disseminated a press release explaining that Angelina virus was not really present in the laptops but the problem was about a pre-installed malware protection software (Bullguard) having a bug that gives an alert reporting the presence of the virus. The bug can be corrected via a patch released by Medion itself.
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