MacDonald’s serves up spyware

Diners ‘rewarded’ with infected music players

Japanese customers of global burger giant

MacDonald’s

have been warned that 10,000 MP3 players handed out by the firm as part of a promotion are infected with a data-stealing worm.

The USB-sticks given out to burger buyers were laden with free tunes, but also harboured malware labelled

QQPass

by

Trend Micro

, which copies itself to removable drives and harvests confidential data.

MacDonald’s

has offered replacement spyware-free prizes, and has directed its customers to free clean-up tools provided by

Trend

. The infected devices were only given away in Japanese branches of the burger chain.

In a similar vein, a small number of

Apple

‘s

Video iPod

media players sold since September appear to be infected with an as-yet unidentified piece of

Windows

malware. In a

press release from

Apple


,

Microsoft

are criticised for failing to secure their operating system against such malware, further fuelling the

Mac

security debate.

Posted on 19 October 2006 by

Virus Bulletin