There's nothing quite like waking up on your holiday of choice to the gift of a shiny new gadget that adorned your wishlist for the last couple of months—only to find out that, upon plugging it into your PC, it attempts to install a virus. Recipients of several different models of photo frames from Wal-Mart, Amazon, and other retailers experienced this new holiday downer, which is just a reflection of a continuing upward trend in malware over the holidays.

Recipients of a Mercury 1.5-inch Digital Photo keychain from Wal-Mart (and presumably other stores) were reportedly greeted by a virus. Files DPFMate.exe and FEnCodeUnicode.dll are found on at least some of these Mercury keychains, according to Slashdot, and Samsung's SPF-85H 8-inch digital photo frame was struck by a worm as well.

Amazon e-mailed a warning to customers about the Samsung frame a few days before Christmas, explaining that the W32.Sality.AE worm rears its head in the "SAMSUNG FRAME MANAGER XP VERSION 1.08" software on the installation disc.





A Mercury digital photo keychain which

packed a "special" holiday present this year



As HotHardware points out, this isn't the first time malware has attempted to hijack our digital photo memories, either. Last year, a trojan called "Mocmex" shipped on various photo frames from retailers like Best Buy, Target, and Costco. Mocmex downloads files it needs, renames them randomly, then hides them around the machine in order to sabotage over 100 antivirus utilities.

Plenty of other devices, including TomTom GPS units, have suffered from the same scourge over the years.

Just like last year, malware was on the rise in various forms this holiday season. The stock market plunge inspired malware authors to crank up their efforts to 11.0 in October, and Microsoft issued its own warnings for holiday-themed trojans and worms at the beginning of December. Even good ol' fashioned holiday e-greeting cards were back out in full force, with e-mails offering links to fun cards and games malicious software from domains like itsfatherchristmas.com, whitewhitechristmas.com, and freechristmasworld.com.

Unfortunately, the US is maintaining its place as king of the malware hill. Despite a couple of big-name malware ISP crackdowns, the US still increased its distribution share of these e-mail, scareware, fakeware, and other malicious software from 23.4 percent in 2007 to 37 percent in 2008.

Now, it seems, not even the toys under the tree are safe.