the virus already on the product before it leaves the factory floor?

[acroyear]

that's a new one on me (at least as far as tech goes. happens in the food industry with annoying regularity, of course...)

Olympus Stylus Tough camera carries malware infection | Graham Cluley's blog:

Olympus Japan has issued a warning to customers who have bought its Stylus Tough 6010 digital compact camera that it comes with an unexpected extra - a virus on its internal memory card.

The first thing to point out is that the camera itself is not at risk - the autorun worm being carried on its internal memory can not activate on the Stylus Tough camera, but can attempt to infect your Windows PC.

In other words, users are at risk of infecting their Windows computers with the autorun worm when they plug the device into their USB drive, a method of transmission effectively identical to the infected Samsung Wave smartphones we reported on last week.

Comments

[blueeowyn.livejournal.com]

I thought that one of the Excel versions in the 1990s had a virus in the software ... specifically the PC version not the Mac.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

Excel (like the first P4 chips, around the same time) was just broken. It was very susceptible to macro viruses at the time because it had no security system to prevent them (gee, Microsoft behind on security? who knew?!), but it wasn't carrying a bug "out of the box" like this is.

What made that particular flaw (by the time of Excel 97) worse was the fact that Excel tapped into OLE with near impunity, so the macros could to, which mean that a macro virus which would once have only affected your spreadsheet could now impact your whole system.

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

There have been several devices that shipped with malware from the factory. Also some media has shipped pre-infected.