purpleydog
|
I recently took 27 trojans off one of my computers, after I opened the games console. This is an HP machine, and anyone who has an HP that is less than 3 years old has this HP games console. I hardly ever open it up, so when I did last week, it did an auto-update, HP updates the games available, and upgrades existing games and installs new ones. I played one game until the trial period was up. I then clicked on another game to see what it was like, and got a warning from AVAST (my free anti-virus program) that there was a trojan in it, while it was loading. Before I could stop it, it opened, and there it was... a Neptunia trojan (which just came out last month btw). I quarantined it to the "Virus Chest" and did a boot scan. I had AVAST scan every single file in every folder on my machine. The first time, it found 17 trojans, all of them were from the games console, inside games. All of them were downloaded by HP, yes Hewlett Packard. I put them in the virus chest. I then did a little investigating.
WildTangent is the games distributor for many of these games for HP, although HP does the installation and upgrades. I found some games were wildtangent, and some were from HP Media center.
I then did another boot scan right away. There were 10 more trojans, most of them the Win32 with various versions. 7 of them were in my "D" drive, which is the back up for my system, and they were contained in the media games center. The other ones had migrated to other files.
These all came from an update to my computer from HP's website. They weren't there before, as I haven't used this machine in awhile, and had it off and not connected. Plus, I ran a boot scan when I brought it back up, and found nothing. Now, I have several files that are corrupted that I've been deleting and running more scans to see what comes up next.
I sent an email to HP support about this, and they never responded, although they did want me to take a customer care questionnaire.
Thing is, this machine is networked to the other machines in the house, and only one other one runs XP. That laptop didn't have any problems at all. The other machines are either 64 bit systems, or they are running Linux, so they didn't pick up the trojans. I'm just amazed that HP is installing updates, not only to the games, but to the computer itself, and with them, installing virii and trojans.
That is neither ethical, nor practicing due diligence. Think a letter to "The Register" is in order. Think they may like to know.
|