Worm Eats into McDonald's Promotion

Winners of 10,000 MP3 players given away in a McDonald's promotion in Japan (only) got an unwelcome bonus: a worm in their prizes.

The Japanese subsidiary of the fast food chain has warned its winners that their new players are infected with WORM_QQPASS.ADH, which can steal personal data if activated by plugging the player into a PC. The company is offering a link to a Trend Micro program that can remove the worm from infected computers, and is replacing the MP3 players on request, says our colleague Peter Sayer of the IDG News Service.

The worm spreads from the MP3 player to other removable drives on Windows systems and tries to disable some antivirus applications. It also attempts to transmit account logon information from the QQ Instant Messenger application, popular in China and South Africa.

McDonald's ran the MP3 player promotion in August and sent the prizes to 10,000 winners in late September. Trend Micro rates the risk of damage from the worm as high, but says few infections have been reported so far.