Posted on Saturday, October 11 2008 @ 22:28 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
ASUS
admitted that some of its Eee Box desktop mini PCs have shipped with a virus:
But while the company has only admitted the infection was present in machines shipped to Japan, Register Hardware can confirm that other territories may be affected too.
According to an email sent out by Asus, PC Advisor reports, the Eee Box's 80GB hard drive has the recycled.exe virus files hidden in the drive's D: partition. When the drive is opened, the virus activates and attempts to infect the C: drive and an removable drives connected to the system.
According to Symantec, the malware is likely to be the W32/Usbalex worm, which creates an autorun.inf file to trigger recycled.exe from D:.
Separately, we've been testing the Eee Box this week, and discovered our review unit came loaded with the W32/Taterf worm - aka W32.Gammima.AG, aka kavo.exe malware that sniffs out online gaming usernames and passwords.
This isn't the first time ASUS accidentally shipped systems with unwanted software. Last month
it was unveiled that some ASUS notebooks came with a recovery DVD that features illegal software and confidential documents.
