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3 Nerd-Its
RE: Maybe...
The iPod was just a simple example because they can run an operating system and drive (when present) their firewire port. The attack isn't dependent on the device appearing or acting like a hard drive. It directly communicates with the underlying hardware utilizing the DMA controller which is made available via the Firewire protocol. So the attack is after the contents of RAM rather than the contents of the host's drives.
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Maybe...
I'm a little skeptical of this because the iPod stopped using the FW interface years ago, with Generation 4 iPods, which were discontinued in Oct 2005. That's getting old enough to the point where anyone with an iPod that old must've cared for it pretty well, and then probably has invested in the battery replacement (which most don't). Then hard drive failures begin to be a factor, so I don't think that there are a whole lot of these in the wild anyway.
On the other hand, what you are talking about here has been a well known phenomenon in the Mac world for a long time--as long as there has been a FireWire. Macs can hook up to another Mac and boot one of the Mac's in "target disk" mode, which basically makes it an external hard drive to the "master" Mac. There are ways to secure your Mac so no-one does this against your will, however, so it's kind of odd nobody evidently built a protection against this into Windows...
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