Gabriela Schmid

Digital Picture Frames Contain Virus



Posted: Tuesday, February 17, 2009

by Gabriela Schmid
Spacelocker

Are digital picture frames harmful to your electronic health? There are growing concerns that they are. Elinor Mills points to growing evidence that some of these plug and play devices imported from China contain a virus.  She said in a post for cnet news that "Before Christmas, Samsung and Amazon issued alerts warning customers that some Photo Frame Driver CDs for Samsung's SPF line of digital photo frames contained a virus in the frame manager software. Customer PCs running Windows XP are at risk of being infected by the virus, W32.Sality.AE, which drops a keylogger or backdoor onto the system. Element and Mercury brand frames sold at Circuit City and Wal-Mart, respectively, also were reported to be infected, according to The San Francisco Chronicle. Digital photo frame sales are increasing and Chinese suppliers produced more than 8 million in 2007, according to MarketResearch.com. Their plug-and-play use and the fact that they serve as a digital replacement for paper albums make electronic picture frames popular holiday gifts."

What can the consumer do to protect themselves from these viruses? Ms. Mills says that "Right now the best protection against being infected by viruses in new devices is to keep anti-virus software up to date and disable Windows' AutoRun features and instead manually launch programs and installers when devices are inserted".

Gabriela is one of the publisher of Spacelocker.com the First Online School Locker
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