Discussion on:

HP becomes next vendor to ship malware-infected media

New servers or workstations needing some sort of installation media to complete a setup might not have any anti-virus software installed yet. Do you make it a habit to manually scan all such media?

In the past you didn't have to worry about such concerns but I believe today before you connect anything to a computer it should only be done with an active virus software program that is up to date. When this isn't possible such as in the case of the server scenario then that hardware needs to be checked on a system with that capability. This should become a standardized practice whether the computer is a server, desktop, or laptop. It's also an increase security issue for home users whom many may utilize VPN connections to their company servers now offer another point of attack that has to be monitored.

Are we beginning to see problems from these organizations outsourcing their production of products overseas? I fear that this is only the start of a pandemic of issues that hardware manufacturers will face from outsourcing. If the quality control of manufactures that have this issue can't resolve these problems they will rapidly lose customers.

What does it say when you can't plug in a storage device or flash memory from a digital camera to a computer system without fear, or at best a sigh of relief when it works without a problem. The burden to prevent this will fall on the end user or IT staff that is already stretched. In many instances the end user has a false sense of confidence because they have problems determining if during the install or connection of a storage device if a virus is attacking or if its a normal part of the installation program.

The blame lies solely on the manufacturer quality inspection program, and they should be required to post "caveat emptor" on the product labels!

maybe you were infected and didnt know it?

In the past blank floppies (new) were infected and the first thing to do was to re-format the floppy disks.

I used to demonstrate a very simple virus that upon inserting a floppy went resident in memory, and was aware of the format command. It didn't hijack the format, but as soon as it was done it rewrote itself to the boot sector by calling a sync.

Format, in other words, was/is not always enough.

Over the course of my career, I've seen several instances where integrators have built and delivered both servers and workstations with boot-sector viruses preinstalled -- supposedly because the integrator's boot media was infected unbeknownst to them. But I've never heard of viruses infecting the installation media supplied by the manufacturers themselves. Oy veh! Whatever has this world come to?

I hate to point fingers, but who thought it was a good idea to outsource things to a Communist country? Did they even discuss this with anyone? Don't we have any checks and balances at the govenment level to prevent this?

I'm sure that China thought it was a wonderful opportunity

Hell, they were probably down right gleeful!

PS
Someone call BestBuy and ask them who manufacturers their digital picture frames now...

incoming checks, outgoing common sense. What balance?

I always have my AV software set to scan all files used on any inserted media, and if the media was not created by myself, I ensure my AV software has the latest definitions and run a manual scan on it just in case. This should be standard practice with everyone. A compromised machine may not even have working AV software at all, so you must assume all media is potentially carrying a trojan or virus.

When the virus is embedded in the firmware of your hardware? OMG, guess who's making the IBM laptops now? Guess who the number one purchaser of IBM laptops is?

Well I can only say what I think about this whole debacle since I purchased a digital picture frame from somewhere (don't even remember where) and found it infected with some such something.
My personal opinion is that there should be some legal liability on the company that sells you, or provides you infected media- ESPECIALLY companies such as HP or other big names. If it happens to me again from a flash drive or any other source when I should be able to place full trust in the source, I will sue them,or at least attempt to because someone has to stand up and say that this is just WRONG!!!