James Delahunty
31 Aug 2005 13:12
Creative has made a statement confirming that some of its Zen Neon portable music players, about 4,000 in total, have shipped accidentally with the "W32.Wullik.B@mm" worm. These 4,000 players were all sent to Japan. The windows worm dates back to 2003. It is a mass-mailing worm. On the player, there is an infected file but Creative has said that users would have to browse through the device's filelist and click on it while connected to a PC in order for it to affect the machine.
The company released the serial numbers of the players that are suspected to be infected with the worm. They are serials "1230528000001 through 1230533001680". Shipments of the Zen Neon 5GB model have been suspended temporarily while the company investigates the issue. The company apologised for the annoyance that has been caused to consumers over this matter.
The statement was posted on the company's Japanese site so there are only rough web translations to rely on, which are still complicated to understand. Creative Zen players are becoming increasingly popular, as Creative is now the biggest competitor of Apple Computers. Creative hopes to take some of Apple's 80% market share for portable digital music players away over the coming years by introducing new models that will compete with the iPod.
Source:
InformationWeek