ipod viruses

lots of people have been posting about the fact that apple let a virus slip into it's video ipod product line... a lot of them were rightly ticked off at apple's disingenuous attempt at passing the buck to microsoft for not making their OS "more hardy", and i could certainly parrot that sentiment if i wanted to be a parrot (it certainly wouldn't be the first time i held apple's feet to the fire over malware issues)...

but there's a small kernel of info that was shaken loose that doesn't really seem to have gotten the attention it deserves... see, as much as i enjoy finger pointing, i think this incident (and the similar cock-up by mcdonalds in japan) is an excellent object lesson for the average user about an old malware issue that has been all but forgotten in this day and age - that being that removable media represents a potential infection vector...

oh sure, nobody's making bootsector viruses anymore, and floppy disks are becoming extinct so the traditional threat we used to think of with regards to removable storage media is a non-issue, but removable storage media has evolved and the malware risk has evolved with it and in some ways gotten worse (autorun anyone)... the more things change, the more they stay the same...

if it can store data (like songs or video or whatever) then you should think of it as being as dangerous as a floppy disk used to be... whether it's an actual floppy disk or cd or dvd or flash/pen/thumb/usb drive or mp3 player or media player, so long as it's new to your system it needs to be scanned for malware before anything on it can be used or executed (and that means you should probably disable autorun - as inconvenient as that sounds)... otherwise you have to deal with things like worms infecting your pc as soon as you connect your shiney new ipod to it...