HP USB Drives Infected with Malware Virus   - 1,787 Views, 2 Comments

Hewlett-Packard has issued a Support Bulletin detailing a security vulnerability with two types of optional HP USB drives intended for use with some of the ProLiant family of servers. This vulnerability could cause a local ‘W32.Fakerecy’ or ‘W32.SillyFDC’ virus infection. Yes, HP is unwittingly distributing malware.

According to Symantec, both W32.Fakerecy and W32.SillyFDC are worms that replicate by copying themselves to removable and mapped drives. Luckily for HP they are easy to contain and to remove, and the damage they cause seems to be limited to some small performance degradation. It is not known if either of them may also, at some later date, download other malware.

Now while this is on the face of it a minor problem, easily repaired, it exposes a much larger and potentially more dangerous question; namely, how did these viruses (virii?) get there in the first place? The SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center suspects that the infection originated at HP, but to date there has been no confirmation or denial from HP. If their genesis was indeed the HP factory it begs the supplementary question: how did they evade the test and qualification procedures and find their way into the bill of materials/bill of files? Would these procedures have caught a more virulent and aggressive malware infection before it escaped from HP to wreak havoc? Not in a million years would we have considered HP to be a malware Hot Zone.