Virus shipped with digital media

I recently purchased a LCD Photo Frame which came with 1 GB built in memory over the Internet from a relatively new, up and coming vendor who pride themselves as selling the cheapest LCD products by cutting the middle man.

The truth is their product is cheap (or at least the product that I bought is cheaper than it's competitors). However the product I purchased came with a heavy price...

It had a few files pre-loaded in the inbuilt storage for sample display, a couple of .JPG, an .AVI and a .MPEG, however it also had a .VBS file.

The .VBS file when clicked launches a couple of malware (virus, trojan, rootkit?). One of them was a Trojan and the other tried to alter or install another version of the "explorer.exe" file and was identified as a "Worm" (as identified by the Trend Micro). Luckily, the Trend Micro Internet Security Suite managed to prevent the unauthorised changes these viruses were attempting to do to my PC.

The vendor has been notified and has apologised for this. Their reasoning is that "We will make sure that it will not happen again and notify our factory in china to take extra precautions to avoid this."

My concern is that I hope this is an accidental event and not another trend we are experiencing whereby organised cyber-criminals have infiltrated the factory to get their wares through to these vendors to unsuspecting end users. Packing a Trojan and a possible rootkit together seems like an attempt to control my PC and also collect any information passing through or stored on my PC!

Watch out and scan all forms of digital storage products before using them!