Seagate Hard Drives Came With Trojan Pre-Installed
from the no-extra-charge,-either dept
There have been plenty of stories this year about problems with Chinese manufacturing outlets, though, not many of them have touched on the technology industry. Now, however, Seagate is admitting that some of its hard drives that were made in China came with a trojan horse password sniffer pre-installed. It mostly targeted Chinese online games, but the one American game it included was the ever-popular World of Warcraft. On the plus side, the trojan also disables any other password stealing keyloggers that it finds. Seagate is now offering free copies of anti-virus software to customers impacted by this. In the meantime, experts suggest that you might want to format any new hard drives you get, just to be safe.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: hard drives, trojans, world of warcraft
Companies: seagate
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well, sounds good in theory but
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hmm
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USBs?
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FOA
always.
it dosn't have to be a matter of whats on the drive when it arrives, but rather, what kind of format it was formated under. id rather have my own machine format it prior to use.
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Re: FOA
I know this probably applies less to "new" harddrives, but I bought a WD raptor ~a year ago off ebay, unformatted and thank-you-jesus I was awarded a clean XP Pro installation with Microsoft Office and the entire Macromedia suite! I couldn't get into the protected folders (ie: my documents) but the rest (ie: windows, program files, etc) were wiiiiide open!
Needless to say I'm not a fan of XP pro (Win 2000 or BUST!) so I formatted and lost it all again, but it was a fun experiment.
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I Guess
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Or not
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Format
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Prepare
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Or just use Linux, and you'll have to reformat to ext2 or ext3 or Reiserfs.
And no.. Most Linux distros can use FAT file systems if you choose, and can support NTFS as well, if you need/want them to. So you *could* reformat, but wouldn't really have to - particularly if it was bought to be a shared drive on a duel bootable system. I would assume they were formatted FAT32 and not NTFS, but who knows..
But be careful what you ask for - a lot of people go nuts on their OS of choice. If someday, it does become the most popular out there, then one thing is certain - more malware and viruses will be available for it too!
If gaming gets more Linux friendly (something I'd really like to see myself, actually) then I'm sure they would include both a Windows and a Linux version of the Trojan for us!
But it doesn't matter. These companies are all going as dirt cheap as they can on manufacturing, and well.. I guess you get what you pay for!
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Re:
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Re:
As for the other naysayer about Linux not being game friendly, there are a lot of games out there that are being ported to Linux. CS and CSS and Quake3 being just three that I have used in the past.
And no, this isn't about an "OS" war. Everyone has their favorite OS. Mine is actually W2K. Stable and hasn't failed me yet. A shame really since Vista is a dud, and was stopped being force fed to us through new machine vendors who refused to install it and by manufacturer's like Lenovo who are actually offering a backwards' install of WXP if you bought a machine that had Vista installed.
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Re:
As for the other naysayer about Linux not being game friendly, there are a lot of games out there that are being ported to Linux. CS and CSS and Quake3 being just three that I have used in the past.
And no, this isn't about an "OS" war. Everyone has their favorite OS. Mine is actually W2K. Stable and hasn't failed me yet. A shame really since Vista is a dud, and was stopped being force fed to us through new machine vendors who refused to install it and by manufacturer's like Lenovo who are actually offering a backwards' install of WXP if you bought a machine that had Vista installed.
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You think though - it's possible next time - for someone to copy a 'different' low level format utility to the disk that comes with the system that re-writes the virus to the disk when used?
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More china shit
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no moe chit about it....
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KillDisk
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INFO
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New drives
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Seagate HD Trojan
Enjoy
Bill
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Chicken and egg problem for Windows users
A WIndows user has to plug in the external USB drive to use it. The default "Autorun" will run the trojan and infect the main machine immediately, long before you can format it away. *YOU MUST REPARTITION AND FORMAT IT ATTACHED TO ANOTHER MACHINE THAT IS USING A NON-WINDOWS OS*.
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Keyloggers
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