This year digital photo frames were one of the most popular items in Santa's big red bag, but little did your mother-in-law know that she was also getting a nasty little virus from your thoughtful and sentimental gift. There are reports that retailers Wal-Mart, Amazon and probably others have sold digital photo frames and keychains preloaded with mal-ware.

Merry Christmas, Mom!

The devices in question are the Mercury 1.5" Digital Photo Keychain, which Wal-Mart still has available on their website with no warnings or precautions; and the Samsung SPF-85H 8-inch with 1GB memory.

Amazon, unlike Wallyworld, has at least gone to the trouble to issue some kind of statement explaining how to uninstall your free gift with purchase. You can also go to Samsung's site for instructions for removal and to download the updated driver and installation.
There are no details about the malware discovered on the Mercury product sold by Wal-Mart, but the Samsung virus is called W32.Sality.AE and is contained on the installation disc.

The Sality virus is a relatively low risk infection and fairly easy to remove. (Or so they say.) It can infect Windows XP, NT and 2000. There aren't reports of Vista machines being attacked ... yet.

When the virus is installed it creates, deletes, and modifies registry subkeys; bypasses the Windows firewall, and infects all executable files located in specific subkeys. From there the virus phones home to various URL addresses, potentially downloading other malware and preventing access to security related domains like McAfee and Symantec.

And they call this a low risk virus, but that was probably before Samsung tried to take over the world, one digital frame at a time.

So, enjoy your shiny new toy. I hope it is worth ruining your computer for and the price of a bottle of Ibuprofen that it will take to get rid of the headache that ensues.

To protect yourself from dangerous computer viruses and infections see our antivirus reviews. The #1 product, BitDefender was not on the list of services W32.Sality.AE stops from running.

You may also find some virus-free fun in some related posts:

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