(some) TT GO 910 infected with virus

Some members of this website's forum claimed that their newly purchased TomTom GO 910 had been infected with a virus. It took until today for this to be officially confirmed by TomTom, and they've provided some details on what were, until recently, only rumours . And to be brief: Yes, some devices were shipped with a virus!

Past year

It concerns a relatively small, but unknown number of devices, which were manufactured between September and November last year, and which were shipped with firmware 6.51. The files which are infected reside in the root directory of the GO 910: copy.exe, host.exe, autorun.inf and explorer.exe.

The problem became known when a few Norwegian and UK owners mentioned the infection on internet forums. It seems their system's anti-virus software kicked in when they connected their infected PND's to their computer to make a backup. At first, TomTom neither confirmed nor denied the news.

Acknowledgement

But now, TomTom has acknowledged that a few of their systems were infected with, according to the company, some relatively harmless computer viruses. The culprits are two Trojans, called win32.Perlovga.A Trojan and TR/Drop.Small.qp, which ended up on the GO's during manufacture. Immediately after the viruses were discovered, TomTom took measures to prevent any further infection. Currently, no cases are know where the infection has caused the malfunctioning of any TomTom GO 910.

Virus scanner

The best way to find of if your GO 910 is one of the infected ones, is by using a virus scanner. Simply deleting the aforementioned files would not be very wise; it's best to let specialized software do that job.

Users who experience problems because of this virus, or who have any further questions, can contact TomTom customer support, via the company's support number (UK: 0845 161 0009, US: (866) 486-6866), or their website.

Update: Dutch site Tweakers.net mentions that apart from Perlovga and Drop.Small.qp, there's also a third piece of malicious software: Backdoor.Win32.Small.lo. This last piece of malware holds more risks for the user than the first two, and it's installed onto the system by Drop.Small.qp, just like Perlovga is. Especially annoying is the fact that this malware can be automatically run with the help of the autorun.inf file when the TomTom GO 910 is connected to the computer, making the risk larger than assumed at first.