April 16, 2007: Viruses, hitherto only known to affect computers, now have affected iPods too. iPods are now increasing getting affected by Podloso Virus, discovered by security researchers at Kaspersky Lab. On the positive side of it, it does not travel from one iPod to another automatically unless an infected file is copied, but on fillip side, it affected iPods running on Linux. So far, Linux based operating systems have been free from viruses

At most risk are iPods running on Linux than on iPod’s proprietary operating system. This virus is known to specifically infect Apple iPods. Though Podloso virus, so far is known to do a very limited damage, it has rang alarm bells in iPod trade industry and has proved that no platform is free from the looming threat of virus. Researchers at the lab are busy working out safety code for such viruses but as always it remains the game of one upmanship, as usually, it is the malware designers that are able to spot the flaw in system security first.

Henry Thomas of UK, a regular importer of iPods from Hong Kong in bulk, received a shock of his life when a bulk buyer of iPods from him rejected his entire shipment on account of infected iPods. Earlier, Thomas has been ignoring complaints of malfunction because of routine defects.

Though Podloso does not travel automatically from one system to another, it is ringing alarm bells in the industry as future viruses could be more dangerous. Besides, iPods, smart phones and PDAs, are likely to face more threats in the future. Even USB drives are subject to infection. They can have a virus embedded into their system that launches when a user plugs them in.

Most of these infections in new iPods happen when the operating system software is copied through infected machine. Each machine generally copies software in thousands of pieces per day, thus spreading the risk. Another problem associated with this is that, most these low price range iPods, lose their storage space by about 90 percent when formatted by used. For example, storage space in a 256 mb iPod, after formatting, gets reduced to about 20 Mb only.