Windows virus found on 1 percent of video iPods

Monday, September 25, 2006

Apple has announced that less than one percent of its latest video iPods sold after September 12th comes with a Windows virus onboard. The RavMonE.exe virus was transmitted from a Windows machine used to test the product and until now has been signaled only by 25 users.

This issue concerns only video iPods and other devices like the iPod nano and the iPod shuffle are not affected. As for the operating systems involved only Windows is affected while there is no problem with Mac OS X systems.

It is activated by double clicking on the iPod in Windows Explorer and doesn’t do any damage to the Windows OS or its data. However it can lower the security settings of the infected Windows so Apple suggests customers that bought a video iPod after that date to scan the system for virus.

If the user does not have an antivirus suite installed Apple put on its website a series of links to trial versions of an antivirus. Once the suite is installed the customers only has to launch it and the antivirus will automatically detect the virus and remove it.

Since this virus only tries to access external storage devices (and not the network) a complete scan of all these device is recommended too. The list of drives to scan includes hard drives, memory cards and fresh drives.

The company also announced that the virus was discovered one week ago. After testing the solution to this problem Apple revamped the testing process so this kind of things should not happen again. Therefore all the video iPods that now Apple is selling are virus-free.