Posted on 11/12/2007 2:00:49 PM PST by Mount Athos
Portable hard discs sold locally and produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology have been found to carry Trojan horse viruses that automatically upload to Beijing Web sites anything the computer user saves on the hard disc, the Investigation Bureau said.
Around 1,800 of the portable Maxtor hard discs, produced in Thailand, carried two Trojan horse viruses: autorun.inf and ghost.pif, the bureau under the Ministry of Justice said.
The tainted portable hard disc uploads any information saved on the computer automatically and without the owner's knowledge to www.nice8.org and www.we168.org, the bureau said.
The affected hard discs are Maxtor Basics 500G discs.
The bureau said that hard discs with such a large capacity are usually used by government agencies to store databases and other information.
Sensitive information may have already been intercepted by Beijing through the two Web sites, the bureau said.
The bureau said that the method of attack was unusual, adding that it suspected Chinese authorities were involved.
In recent years, the Chinese government has run an aggressive spying program relying on information technology and the Internet, the bureau said.
The bureau said this was the first time it had found that Trojan horse viruses had been placed on hard discs before they even reach the market.
The bureau said that it had instructed the product's Taiwanese distributor, Xander International, to remove the products from shelves immediately.
The bureau said that it first received complaints from consumers last month, saying they had detected Trojan horse viruses on brand new hard discs purchased in Taiwan.
Agents began examining hard discs on the market and found the viruses linked to the two Web sites.
Anyone who has purchased this kind of hard disc should return it to the place of purchase, the bureau said.
The distributor told the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times' sister newspaper) that the company had sold 1,800 tainted discs to stores last month.
It said it had pulled 1,500 discs from shelves, while the remaining 300 had been sold by the stores to consumers.
Seagate's Asian Pacific branch said it was looking into the matter.
I’ll take two please.
It’s nothing a repartition/reformat wouldn’t solve. Do people not automatically do that anyway?
good way to destroy a competitor.
Globalization is sooo good for the common defense.
China is our FRIEND! /s
I don't know if we've ever bought anything from Seagate Technology, but we certainly won't buy anything from them now!
Why? Flatten the partitions and reformat and the little beasties are gone.
I’ll leave that to my guru hubby. I don’t know nuthin’ bout no disks! =)
You wouldnt want a seagate product anyway. Western Digital makes the best disk drives.
People who know how to partition wouldnt buy a seagate anyway.
Didn't they acquire Conner some time ago?
Why are we allowing packets to China, anyway? When will someone finally drag an anchor chain over the cable/fiber and end all this?
Over the years with Western Digital drives I’ve personally seen a failure rate of 8 to 1 over Seagate’s. In short, I’ll never understand why people ever buy Western Digital drives.
I guess people will always have a need for multiple door stops. :)
p.s. In fact my ST-506 and ST-412 (both Seagates) still run to this day.
No, people automatically assume a product will perform just as advertised.
I have 1 or 2 U320s running from Seagate nicely. I never saw a new HD that was partitioned. Those have to be planned and formatted in whatever file system you use. I think people buying partitioned and formatted 500GB HDs are lazy idiots.
Their price is right, but their drives are not very reliable.
definitely avoid maxtors
PING
Another good reason for my practice of immediately formating any new drives to ext3... Linux doesn’t do Windows viruses. I don’t even have wine or any other emulators loaded...
“Waiter! Low level formats for the house!”
hehehe
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