Virus ridden piece of fecal matter!!!

The BBQ Pit
1

So my wife and I were perusing the aisles at the local Walmart, in order to purchace sundries at cut-rate prices. I pass through the elecronics aisle and note that the “pen cam” digital cameras are still selling for around $45. I had purchased one some time ago on a lark, as it seemed like a fun thing to have. However, as it was a cheap ass camera, its focus was a bit off and I had never been really pleased with it.

A little later, my travels brought me to the toy aisle. There, lo and behold, were the same cameras selling for $15! Marketed as " Cyber Gear Digital Camera", it seemed to be just like the one I already owned.

So I bought it.

Dumb.

I brought it home, hooked it up to my computer and installed the software for it. I took some pics. They looked a little orange, but otherwise about the same quality one expects from a cheap CMOS based digicam. Then I tried out the AVI capture software.

I recorded a few seconds of video, and saved it to my hard drive. However I could not find the file after I had saved it. What DID appear was a file called “scrap.eml”. I click on it.

My virus software goes nuts.

Apparently, instead of saving an AVI file, this fetid fucking rats anus of a worm felching sorry excuse for software is nothing more than a carrier for the Nimda-E virus.

Fucking great.

Now I want to be sure it is this software that is the problem, so I uninstall it, do another virus sweep, (finding nothing) and re-install. Same thing happens.

I was fortunate that the virus scanner cought it before it spread too much.

So as a warning to all you out there, stay far away from Wal-Mart Cyber Gear Pen cams. Unless you WANT virus infested shitstain puke-sucking software on your computer.

(Terse e-mails are being sent to Walmart and the manufacturer.)

2

Did your virus software identify and name the virus?

(it’s possible for AV software to get it wrong and be triggered by completely innocent files/activity)

3

Yes. The Nimda-e virus. It’s no mistake. Why would this software create an .Eml file instead of an avi? The .eml wasn’t even named the same thing that I had named the avi file I had tried to create. But as my reinstaling proved, it was the cam software that was creating the .eml file.

4

Also, the first time I was infected, It infected three other files and poped up a bunch of file instalation boxes.

5

I hope you took it back to the store or called the company! That’s seriously fucked up!

6

Not yet. But I am going to.

7

When was the software created?

8

Also, any identifying information you can provide from the camera and the software would be appreciated. Brand names, URLs, etc.

9

Oops; sorry, I somehow missed you mentioning this in the OP (eye burn from all that profanity, that must be it, not any error on my part :wink: )

I suspect it’s more likely to be a case of carelessness on the part of whoever compiled the driver/software CD, rather than any malicious intent - not that this affects the outcome in any meaningful way.

It may be possible to download a clean set of drivers from somewhere…

10

Mangetout is correct, I’ve seen this happen before. When I was in grad school, I was a TA for an undergrad lab psych course. A company sent us floppies that had a tutorial and simple application for doing statistics, and they were shipped infected with some virus. I’ve also seen one or two decent-sized game companies make MS-Word documents available that have Word macro viruses in them.

Like he said, not that this will help with your problem, but at least you can probably assume that this wasn’t done intentionally.

11

This has happened before too with a Power Puff Girls DVD. Some numbnut forgot to thoroughly check the DVD-ROM features before finalizing them and sent it off for production. This was the first known case of a computer virus being spread by a DVD.

12

Well I found the website for the company that made the stupid thing. Here it is.

http://www.sakar.com/nav.asp?id=4

The item I bought was the 3-in-1 Digital/Pc-Web/Video camera .

Oddly enough, there is nothing at that link. I did, however, find the driver software there and installed it. Works fine with no nimda infestation. I think Mangetout is right. The cam is made in China, so…

But it works ok now. I think I see why it was marked down to $15 from $20 though.

The interesting thing is, while my virus software was easly able to detect the resultant files made from the AVI software, it did not detect any virus in the AVI software itself. Nor does it detect any viruses on the installation cd. Only when that software ran, did the virus show up. Nasty.