Merry Christmas, Dad! Here’s Your Trojan.

I just finished writing a piece last week talking about the possibility of introducing networked items into your home that could trojanize your PC. I used the example of a toaster and a beer chiller. I should have instead used digital picture frames. Not only do they sell some that are network aware, but they come preloaded from Sam’s Club with a Trojan Horse program.

We gave a picture frame like this one here at Sans to our father. Oops.

From Sans:

We received a report this afternoon from someone who had recently received a digital picture frame. Unfortunately, it had an extra component with it. The built-in storage came with what appears to be some malware already loaded on it — a file called ‘cfhskjn.exe’ was on it when unpacked.

Some of the behavior seen when the digital picture frame was connected to the computer was:

• MSCONFIG would not run – it would briefly open and then terminate
• The system would blue screen when starting in safe mode
• Going to various anti-virus websites would result in the web browser terminating
• Various popups for random name.exe “with ‘not valid image’ messages

This specific product was an “ADS Digital Photo Frame – 8″ sold by Sam’s Club – see here. but this type of infection can, and has affected other portable devices with internal storage.

Dad, don’t run any programs on the frame. You may even want to format it first.