photoframeIf you gave the Samsung SPF-85H 8-inch digital photo frame as a gift this year, you may have given more than the picture frame. You may have also given your friends and family a nasty virus.

Amazon reached out to its purchasers with a note just before the holiday. Here’s a snippet of their warning to customers:

“The alert concerns discovery of the W32.Sality.AE worm on the installation disc SAMSUNG FRAME MANAGER XP VERSION 1.08, which is needed for using the SPF-85H. If you are using Vista or a different version of Frame Manager, this issue does not affect you”.

The note goes on with step-by-step instructions on what to do if you are affected. Basically, users of Windows XP seem to be most at risk. This is not the first time digital frames have been found with viruses. Last year, a really insidious Trojan Horse virus called Mocmex found on a variety of digital frames and identified by all of the major security programs. These frames were sold at stores that included Sam’s Club, Best Buy, Target and Costco.

The virus collected passwords for online games. The virus could be used for more lucrative targets in the near future.

This year’s W32.Sality.AE virus is already detectable if you have up-to-date virus protection on your computer. If not removed, the virus can drop malware onto your Win32 PE executable files, making them 50kb longer as well as downloading malware from a variety of domains.

Technology users are seeing a dangerous trend; consumer hardware with pre-installed viruses and malware. It may be a good idea to scan anything that connects to your machine.

If you have one of these picture frames take some time and run a virus scan. There are a lot of great free virus scanners that will detect this and other issues.