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Technology News
Razer ships malware with drivers
Richard - September 23rd, 2009 4:19 PM
One of the most popular peripheral manufacturers, Razer has unknowingly been distributing malware alongside its driver updates.
The Trojan - troj.dropper.jiz, which downloads and installs a copy of worm.aspxor.ab - was discovered on Razer’s product support website by anti-virus vendor Trend Micro.
The analysis of the website carried out by Trend Micro shows that at least eight of the driver packages available for download on Razer’s support site was infected with the trojan. Trend Micro also claims that only "7 out of 41 [anti-virus] vendors offered generic detection" of the trojan, which could mean that users may be unaware that their computer has been infected.
The worm, which is classified at the highest possible severity level by threat analysis site ThreatExpert, spreads by opening a random TCP port on the infected system and connecting to external SMTP servers in order to send spam with itself as an attachment. This isn’t really what you’d want installed on your prized gaming rig. Razer are advising users to download free anti-virus scanners that are available online from Avast and Trend Micro.
Razer has temporarily taken its support site offline while it investigates the issue and checks to make sure it has caught all instances of the Trojan before re-enabling driver downloads from the site.
It is currently not known at this site whether the support site itself was hacked or lax internal policies allowed drivers to be packaged up with the trojan.
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