Article: McDonald’s Promotion Serves Up Virus-Infected MP3 Players

Adrants.com reports:

McDonald’s Promotion Serves Up Virus-Infected MP3 Players
As part of a McDonald’s Japan promotion, the burger giant, along with Coke, gave away 10,000 MP3 players to those who purchased specially marked cups of Coke. Unfortunately, the MP3 players were infested with QQPass, a piece of spyware, that, once connected to people’s PCs, allowed hackers access to passwords and other personal information. McDonald’s issued a public apology and a recall for the infected MP3 players. It’s unclear whether the company made any restitution for any data lost by those who were infected.

Lesson learned: You really can’t trust anything you get for free. Even a seemingly harmless, generic MP3 player can cause chaos for you, resulting in much wasted time and frustration to fix the problem.

Be wary and pass on the “free stuff.”
-Roland

Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at Chaos365.com and AdMadMan.com.

©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.