Unconfirmed reports are that around 1700 cameras were sold to end-users before the problem was spotted. Olympus has issued a public apology and is asking affected users to return the camera for a refund.
The episode is very similar to Vodafone's Spanish operating team discovering the presence of the Mariposa botnet on a batch of its HTC Magic smartphones. As reported earlier this year by Infosecurity, the incident was blamed on a memory card infection.
Commenting on the latest device infection incident, Sophos' senior technology consultant Graham Cluley said that the camera itself is not at risk, as the autorun worm being carried on its internal memory "cannot activate on the Stylus Tough camera, but can attempt to infect your Windows PC."
"In other words, users are at risk of infecting their Windows computers with the autorun worm when they plug the device into their USB drive, a method of transmission effectively identical to the infected Samsung Wave smartphones reported on last week", he said in a security blog posting late yesterday.
Cluley went on to say that there have been a number of other digital device infections, including a set of USB sticks that were given away by IBM, also earlier this year.
"With such a long history of incidents like this, more companies need to wake up to the need for better quality control to ensure that they don't ship virus-infected gadgets", he said.