An insidious computer virus recently discovered on digital photo frames has been identified as a powerful new Trojan Horse from China that collects passwords for online games — and its designers might have larger targets in mind.
“It is a nasty worm that has a great deal of intelligence,” said Brian Grayek, who heads product development at Computer Associates, a security vendor that analyzed the Trojan Horse… The authors of the new Trojan Horse are well-funded professionals whose malware has “specific designs to capture something and not leave traces,” Grayek said. “This would be a nuclear bomb” of malware.
Mocmex is its name. Reportedly, it can evade hundreds of anti-malware and firewall products, including the Windows Firewall. I suspect that this succeeds only when users are logged in as administrators, so here’s yet another reason to stop doing this altogether, as is the US Government with its new Federal Desktop Core Configuration for Windows XP and Windows Vista.
The virus actually propagates to just about any kind of removable USB storage device, jumping from various well-concealed hiding places on your PC whenever such a device is inserted. Picture frames are implicated because the virus apparently originated in the factory where the frames were built (in turn sold by Best Buy, Sam’s Club, Target, and Costco, but now discontinued). Amazingly, according to the UK security firm Prevx, over 67,500 variants of this thing exist!
