Asus does it again!
A couple of weeks ago we covered the Asus recovery scandal and more importantly how exactly it came to occur. A couple of days ago, however, it was discovered that Asus has graduated from simple keygens and private documents to full on viruses.
First it was keygens, source code, Microsoft documents and resumes in the system root and recovery disk directories, and now its an actual virus recognized by Symantec as W32/Usbalex worm. The worm is a nasty one, which spreads itself via automatic execution by way of autorun.inf, used to infect all hard drives and removable media on the system.
The virus (with the filename recycled.exe, ironically) was discovered on the D: (go ahead, laugh at the face) drive of the EEE PCs in question. The drive is a partition of the 80GB hard drive that comes stock with the models in question, most notably containing the model numbers starting with “EEEBOXB202-B”.
This is yet another sign of the ever decreasing quality control these days among hardware vendors, and Asus is on a roll with this and their recovery disk affair. Asus could open up a flurry of economy-aiding jobs by just letting people check system directories for anything unusual, or even an “if its not this…” scenario, which would by far offer a higher level of quality control than what they apparently offer now. Asus is great about their Linux support on their laptops and earn the due respect in the tech community, but will lose their profit-generating community (i.e. the general public, Windows users) if they keep earning a bad reputation of shipping faulty products like this.
If Dell or HP got caught in either one of these scenarios, the fallout would have been much greater, but Asus can still be impacted by this business and reputation wise, something no company needs in these times of economic uncertainty. That said, Asus is not alone, since they merely joined the ranks of Apple, TomTom and several digital picture frame manufacturers in shipping malware on their products, only Asus is the first to ship it on an actual computer instead of letting malware simply have the risk of being spread to one.
…Not to mention being the first to ship source code and internal documents – Oh wait, Microsoft DID ship the Xbox’s ROM-securing VM code in the original Xbox’s flash chip. Yet another example of poor quality control among vendors these days, a case where being alone in a rank is a good thing for consumers albeit deficient in the CMA department.
