Seagate Hard Drives Came With Trojan Pre-Installed

from the no-extra-charge,-either dept

Thu, Nov 15th 2007 10:48am — Mike Masnick

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.

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Filed Under: hard drives, trojans, world of warcraft
Companies: seagate

26 Comments

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Joe, 15 Nov 2007 @ 10:54am

Wouldnt just about everyone format these drives to load an OS ? i can see if you hooked it up as a secondary etc, but the chances of a drive being used and not being formatted seam slim to me.
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Faz, 15 Nov 2007 @ 11:15am

hmm
good point Joe, unless someone was lazy but still fdisk and format no???
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Bob, 15 Nov 2007 @ 11:17am

"I would always format my hard drive as soon as it arrives," Paul Ferguson, network architect for antivirus vendor Trend Micro told InternetNews.com. "For many people, most hard drives arrive pre-formated from the plant and they use it as is. My advice would be always reformat the drive before installing anything on it.".
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chris (profile), 15 Nov 2007 @ 11:17am

USBs?
most usb harddrives come pre formatted and most people don't format them. is that what they are talking about?
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MATT, 15 Nov 2007 @ 11:22am

well, sounds good in theory but
just a fyi the corrupted files are ones that the computer doesn't typically wipe, it was in the master boot table IIRC
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Anonymous Coward, 15 Nov 2007 @ 11:29am

FOA
Format on Arrival

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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Linux ROCKS, 15 Nov 2007 @ 11:49am

Or just use Linux, and you'll have to reformat to ext2 or ext3 or Reiserfs.
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Killer_Tofu (profile), 15 Nov 2007 @ 11:51am

I Guess
They must not have enough children paid peanuts there working to farm gold to spam in game to sell you for your real life money. Gotta go to further lengths now. Steal your in game gold to sell back to you for your real life monies.
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B, 15 Nov 2007 @ 11:52am

Or not
OR we could not turn every article into an OS war.
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Max Powers at http://ConsumerFight.com, 15 Nov 2007 @ 11:54am

Format
I was taught to always format a new drive with your own OS and you would find any possible problems at the same time.
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Whirler, 15 Nov 2007 @ 12:06pm

Prepare
Use the manuf's diag disk that comes with the drives and perform a low level format. It will wipe everything on the disk. This is also considered factory certifying the drives....
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Overcast, 15 Nov 2007 @ 12:14pm

More quality products from China I see!

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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Overcast, 15 Nov 2007 @ 12:15pm

Use the manuf's diag disk that comes with the drives and perform a low level format. It will wipe everything on the disk. This is also considered factory certifying the drives....

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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nunya_bidness, 15 Nov 2007 @ 12:38pm

More china shit
more and more crap is coming out of china, the hard drives probably have lead in the label too.
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Anonymous Coward, 15 Nov 2007 @ 12:47pm

Re:
The Linux version of a Trojan would be highly unlikely, and difficult to implement in a way that could function as intended. Permissions and executable status are needed to operate in Linux, must be set by an administrator(root)
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nomochit, 15 Nov 2007 @ 1:32pm

no moe chit about it....
anyone ever wonder if everything that comes out of china might not be accident, lead, drugs, trojan, lets figure this out people......
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Hozer, 15 Nov 2007 @ 2:23pm

KillDisk
an OS format regardless of the OS generally don't do a very good job formating, i run KillDisk on every new drive i get and every drive i know has had a virus. this way it clears out the boot sector as well.
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Bobby Romanski, 15 Nov 2007 @ 2:42pm

INFO
Google Scan's user's email to display advertisements http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/business/media/24adcol.html?ei=5065&en=5822f6a 12e575488&ex=1191297600&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print iPhone a Trojan Horse For Government Surveillance? http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2007/200707iphonesurveillance.htm FBI records audio from cell phone even when battery is out http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2006/071206batteries.htm Prototype software from Google Research could listen to your TV and send back useful information http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19050/ Excellent film on government sponsored terror http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=786048453686176230 DON"T BE DISCOURAGED. Love to everyone.
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JS Beckerist, 15 Nov 2007 @ 2:42pm

Re: FOA
You know what's fun? Run the "undelete" or "unformat" utilities and see what turns up.

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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xtraSico, 15 Nov 2007 @ 3:12pm

New drives
I always have to format / prepare my hard drives. They always come that way. Maybe are the brands I buy. Anyway, it's easy because it's only one or two hard drives, not 20.
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Bill, 15 Nov 2007 @ 3:14pm

Seagate HD Trojan
I test returned HD for Fry's Electronics in Phoenix. 90% of the drives returned because they do not work (Boot or can't be formated) are not initialized and therefor not visible in Explorer. People do not read the instructions nor do they use the Utilities on the CD. What I do? I connect the HD to an external USB HD housing that has it's case removed. I get into "Manage" and then "Disk Management" (Right Click "My Computer". The drive will show if it spins etc and you can repartition and format - Takes me less than 5 min per HD.
Enjoy
Bill
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Linux ROCKS, 15 Nov 2007 @ 4:34pm

Re:
Hmmm I have used Fedora Core 4 through 6, and I have always reformatted to Ext2 or 3 or the Reiserfs. I don't think it will support NTFS, unless you do want to dual boot. And if I wanted to dual boot I would, but use Linux strictly for a home server/game server.
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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Linux ROCKS, 15 Nov 2007 @ 4:34pm

Re:
Hmmm I have used Fedora Core 4 through 6, and I have always reformatted to Ext2 or 3 or the Reiserfs. I don't think it will support NTFS, unless you do want to dual boot. And if I wanted to dual boot I would, but use Linux strictly for a home server/game server.
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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Linux ROCKS, 15 Nov 2007 @ 4:35pm

sorry for the dual post, ugh!
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Walter Dnes, 15 Nov 2007 @ 8:26pm

Chicken and egg problem for Windows users
Article says... "Seagate is warning customers of its external hard drives that their bare drive may not be so bare after all, it might have a Trojan hidden on it."

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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Thomas, 15 Nov 2007 @ 8:35pm

Keyloggers
Well, the author is right saying that this isn't the first issue when keyloggers are installed in new things. So, I think right now the first thing each user should do is to install anti-keylogging protection, even after reformatting the hard drive. If you ask me I recommend Anti-Keylogger(www.anti-keyloggers.com) It doesn't matter where the thing was created - potentially it every PC can have a keylogger(We have already ready about Dell laptops, that had keyloggers), moreover you can easily get a keylogger while surfing the web, or while checking your email in public place. So, my advice to everyone - protect your data!
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