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Trojan Found In New HDs Sold In Taiwan
GSGKT writes "About 1,800 brand new 300-GB or 500-GB external hard drives made for Maxtor in Thailand were found to have trojan horse malwares pre-installed (autorun.inf and ghost.pif). When the HD is in use, these forward information on the disk to two websites in Beijing, China: www.nice8.org or www.we168.org. The article implies that authorities believe the Chinese government is behind the trojans. A later article pins down the point of infection to a subcontractor company in China. A couple of months back the Register was reporting on pre-installed malware detected on Maxtor disks sold in the Netherlands. This earlier report was downplayed by a Seagate spokesman." The more recent Taipei Times article says that Seagate admits the problem on its Web site, but a search there turns up nothing.
Anyone who doesn't wipe a new drive first off is just begging for this sort of thing. Secondly, I guess it's a new competition for Chinese manufacturers to see what's the worst secret addition to a product sent overseas. Lead in toys, GHB in toys, phone-homes on HDD's... what's next killer bees in new TV's... really. Consumerism bites!!
I got a catholic block.
Most PCs ship without professionally produced malware installed. While everyone might *wish* that their PC came with such software, only a small percentage of customers are actually lucky enough to get their malware free of charge. Mac users, don't feel bad that your system won't come with it. You get iLife. :-)
Why not take some initiative.You can block the sites, or you can send them what they want! DATA! Send them lots of data, format it like it was sent with the virus and have fun coming up with a random assortment of websites to include in it (sure we could thing of a couple).
So why ignore when you can use up their bandwidth and screw up their database. Just an idea.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
SATA connector <-> City gate
Disk drive <-> Big wooden horse
Autorun file <-> Greek soldiers
I once bought a computer with Windows preinstalled.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
They figured it was a time saving feature that would save bandwidth for the buyer having the Trojans preinstalled.
Only if you disabled NTLDR as well....
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Perhaps the EU can take up their case.
Have gnu, will travel.
You bastard! I did and that unsavory host at 127.0.0.1 (isn't the 127.x range like the dark back-alleys of the Intertubes?) infected me with a nasty trojan, probably because it has like a million gajigabytes of completely illegal, pirated contents on it!! A veritable pirate hive, that! I hold you pesonally responsible for directing us, pure, innocent Slashdotters to it!
By "Trojans Found In New HDs Sold In Taiwan", I thought they meant condoms.
(OK, who's the comedian? My catchpas is "durable".)
echo 'Header append X-HD-DVD "0x09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0"' >>
In Australia we get a lot of professional tools from the USA. They end up managing telecommunications and other technology companies. I ask you citizens of the United States for the good of the reputation of your country to keep those managers who are complete tools within your borders, cut off their cocaine supply and put them to work sweeping floors somewhere where they can not do much damage with their remaining brain cells.
autorun.inf and ghost.pif, yeah, right. Who still uses windows, AND has autorun enabled?
Answer : Everyone. Even geeks give up configuring Windows to that point after one hundred reinstalls. Or they give up on Windows already... Okay, "who does not reformat new HDs before use?"
Who buys Maxtor HDs anyway? Never had one that even lasted till the end of warranty, used 8 of those in under two years. And there are not enough hours in one year to make up for the order of magnitude between announced and effective MTBF. (168*52 = way less than "tens of thousands of hours".)
Not that I excuse them for dataraping their customers. The exec that ordered that should be put to a very slow and painful death. With the Maxtor engineering team. (If there even IS one.)
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
No, he's right, I'm a closet narcissist. This is my one release in life, to sign my /. posts. I must do it, for if I didn't my heat would explode in an atomic blast unrivaled since the dawn of man. Remember Tunguska? That was when I only had a chance to partially sign a post. You don't want that to happen again do you?
;-)
Here's to saving the world
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
On behalf of every Linux user that's ever had to listen to Windows users making fun of /etc: <nelson>Ha-ha!</nelson>
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?