Posted on 11/12/2007 2:10:24 PM PST by knighthawk
FOCUSED ATTACK: Large-capacity hard disks often used by government agencies were found to contain Trojan horse viruses, Investigation Bureau officials warned
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.
Ping
Let’s once again count our blessings for all the cheap stuff we get to buy from China.
It’s not a problem if you have up to date antivirus software installed on your computer. If you don’t, well, that’s a different matter.
Oh, wrong trojans, nevermind.
I can see your point if these drives are intended as secondary drives. What if these drives are replacment primary drives? The trojan will be there before you can install any anti-anything on them.
I hope this doesn’t adversely impact my ability to but a $200 computer from Wal-Mart.
Why wouldn’t you zero fill the drives a couple times before installing anything on the drive?
Point taken!
It's not hard to disable. (Google Autorun and your OS name.)
If you can't pull that off you are too stupid to own a computer. Pack it up and send it back to where you got it.
These are portable USB drives. It’s actually less dangerous if they’re primary drives, since the usual practice is to fdisk and format them before Windows is installed, in order to make sure the hard drive sectors used are good. As secondary drives, the autorun.inf file comes into play as soon as they are connected to a machine.
Sounds like an inexpensive way to obtain a lot of porn.
I knew somebody was going to say it.
Good point and I agree. However a firewall should detect the trojan attempting to "call home."
This assumes the user has a two-way firewall installed and knows what to do when the firewall issues the alert.
"I call BS. Large data storage is handled by SAN or NAS in most organizations. These disks do not have an operating system installed on them thus this would do nothing. Secondly, our government computer's hard drives do NOT come installed with an operating system. The manufacturers (HP, Dell, Gateway, etc) install an operating system on the drives PRIOR to them shipping to the customer. Things may be different in Taiwan but not here.
Honestly, the most common uses for home grade large storage hard drives are as follows:
movies
music
pornography (probably should put porn first...)"
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