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Virus in your car? Posted by Patrik @ 03:04 GMT

TomTom

Longtime readers of the weblog might remember that we posted on testing a car's Bluetooth enabled phone to see if it could be infected by malware. That time nothing happened, but reports on the Internet now say that you can actually get a virus in your car – or to be more specific, on your TomTom GPS system.

What apparantly happened was that TomTom accidentally included two Windows malware files on the TomTom GO910's hard drive – Perlovga.a and Small.qp. While the device itself isn't infected, users have reported getting notifications from their antivirus products when they've connected the device to their PCs to do a backup.

The infected files are "copy.exe" and "host.exe" and they are located in the root of the hard drive of the GO910. Perlovga.a was discovered in June 2006 and Small.qp back in January of 2005, so they're not new in any way.

This isn't the first time devices have been shipped to customers with malware. In August 2005, Creative shipped 5GB Zen Neeon players containing Wullik.B (also known as Rays.A). In October in 2006, both McDonalds and Apple distributed Windows malware on devices.

There's nothing to be found on TomTom's website about this, but according to a post on DaniWeb, they have sent an official reply to customers. Links to some user reports:

   Link 1
   Link 2
   Link 3 (in German)
   Link 4

Updated to add: An official statement is now available from TomTom.