Now is the time for debunking the Mocmex threat

By Ryan Russell I’m going to do something a little unusual for me; I’m going to tell you that a particular security threat isn’t as bad as it seems. You’ll never catch me saying a particular security problem is impossible or can’t happen to you — I’m often warning about possible future threats — but this time I smell hype.

The San Francisco Chronicle ran an article on Feb. 15 about a “new” Trojan horse named Mocmex. This malicious software, which infects memory cards, has been found in some digital picture frames sold by major retail chains.

The primary source of Mocmex information in the article is Brian Grayek of Computer Associates (CA), with some supporting information supplied by SANS. (Disclosure: The company I work for, BigFix, resells CA antivirus products.).

The Chronicle article, like many in nontechnical publications, gets a lot of details wrong. For example, in the first three paragraphs, it uses the terms Trojan horse, worm, and virus to describe the same thing. And then it quotes Grayek as saying, “This would be a nuclear bomb” of malware.

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