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Seagate Accidentally Shipped 1,800 Trojan-Horse Tainted Drives
Posted by Wilson Rothman at 3:06 AM on November 14, 2007
Roughly 1,800 external drives manufactured by Seagate were infected with a Trojan horse virus that sent personal information back to China, according to the Taipei Times. The disk drives, sold at retail in Taiwan, were presumably messed with when they were in the possession of one of Seagate's Chinese subcontractors. The situation has been locked down, but it certainly puts a new spin on security fears, and Seagate itself has got to be pretty freaked out. All we have at the moment is a statement: "All products leaving the factory are now cleared of the virus." [Reuters]
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
kevjohn
Posted 11:59 AM 13/11/07
You Chinese bastard, you kill my teacher! Err, I mean.... you steal my info!!
kevjohn
Joseph
Posted 11:39 AM 13/11/07
That's pretty crazy. I usually format any drive that I buy brand new anyways, but the majority of people would probably just buy it, toss it in and have all their valuable information pillaged and plundered.
Joseph
diablofreak
Posted 11:35 AM 13/11/07
this was on NYC chinese language newspaper last Thursday.
i thought it was old news since i never heard about it on western media.
i guess these take a few days to translate!
diablofreak
Kaiser-Machead
Posted 12:33 PM 13/11/07
im in ur seagate, stearin' ur fi'es.
Kaiser-Machead
M.O.D.O.K.
Posted 2:06 PM 13/11/07
Guess this is one of the reasons why a Chinese company wanted to buy Sea Gate and why the US Government was worried.
[www.nytimes.com]
M.O.D.O.K.
bucho54
Posted 3:26 PM 13/11/07
"The situation has been locked down, but it certainly puts a new spin on security fears, and Seagate itself has got to be pretty freaked out."
This isn't really a "new spin on security fears". I work in a company that manufactures products that have software running off of hard drives, flash, etc and this has always been a concern to our company as well as our customers. We have never released a virus, trojan, etc however the possibility has come up. That is why we screen all of our products just before boxing them up. It isn't fool-proof (i.e. last guy on the line is disgruntled) but it does catch any accidental issues.
bucho54
Caidence
Posted 2:51 PM 13/11/07
@Skeptical_Geezer:
What do you think the chances are that a person is going to get the new hard drive, boot off the drive's MBR, then in the same instance, turn around and format the drive with the Trojan in TSR memory?
Damn near everyone smart enough to format a drive has already chosen the OS instance they're going to use to do the formatting.
Caidence
Skeptical_Geezer
Posted 2:32 PM 13/11/07
@joseph: What makes you think a trojan horse could not intercept the format command?
Skeptical_Geezer