The British Ministry of Education distributed several thousand Windows notebooks to students, some of which contained malware. The malware was communicating with Russian servers to download more malware.
In the UK, there is one program for students who own (borrow) laptops and tablets PC to participate in home training. But the UK Department of Education provided laptops containing malware to students.
Laptops with Windows 10 provided to schools by the government scheme Get Help With Technology (GHWT) contained the pre-installed Gamarue malware. It is a low-profile remote access worm from the 2010s, according to The Register.
The German BSI he says but that it is a malware downloader that can reload the malware and run it on the infected system.
In the case of Andromeda / Gamarue, this could be, for example, the banking Trojans Citadel, Rovnix or UrlZone / Bebloh.
Additionally, Andromeda/Gamarue can gain additional features with the help of plugins. Among other things, there is a plugin that blocks data access from both email and pre accountsletterFTPs and forwards them to the malware administrators. As reported by The Register, a batch of 23.000 computers are affected.
These devices have been shipped in the last three to four weeks, although it is not clear how many of them are infected. But the BBC he says that few devices have been infected.
Specifically, the affected devices are the GeoBook 1E, manufactured by the Shenzhen-based Tactus team. It is currently considered that the malware was pre-installed on the devices by the manufacturer.
