TomTom shipped viruses on its navigation devices
Satellite navigation company TomTom has admitted that it shipped two viruses on a number of its devices. According to the company, a "small number" of TomTom GO 910 satellite navigation devices were shipped last year with malicious software preinstalled.
"It has come to our attention that a small, isolated number of TomTom GO 910s, produced between September and November 2006, may be infected with a virus. Appropriate actions have been taken to make sure this is prevented from happening again in the future," said TomTom in a statement.
According to tech journalist Davey Winder, who blogged about the problem, the GO 910 units were running version 6.51 of TomTom's software. Winder found that the two pieces of malicious software are win32.Perlovga.A Trojan and TR/Drop.Small.qp, and are resident on the satellite-navigation hard drive within the copy.exe and host.exe files. Winder reported that when a user complained to TomTom about the security breach, he was told that the problem was not serious and was advised to remove the Trojans with antivirus software.