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.

Comments

Same

[renegadesx]

Lead in paint, malware in HD's same thing really

Thank goodness for Chinese manufacturing

[JewGold]

I mean, so what if there's a trojan that steals my identity and turns my computer into a botnet node? So what the materials it's comprised of let off poisons that will kill me and my whole family? I saved $6 on this baby!

Re:How would that even work

[myc]

not for external USB drives that are already pre-formatted with a FAT32 filesystem. Plug it in and go! your box is pwn3d.

that said..

[QuantumG]

Try putting this in your autorun.inf:

[autorun]
shell\silly=You're silly
shell\silly\command=calc.exe
shell=silly

now remove and reinsert the USB device. Hmm.. nothing happens.. how strange. Go to My Computer and double click on I: (or whatever your drive is mapped to) and what happens? Yeah, calc.exe is run. Thanks Microsoft.

You may now flame away.

Re:Not a trojan

[tftp]

A hard disk is mostly... hardware. There's a little software in it, even in a good, uninfected unit

Two cases here. First, you got an external USB HDD. It often contains lots of software. I have a Seagate USB/FireWire HDD, it comes with FreeAgent backup and configuration software. I bought the software with the HDD unit, they are one set. I would be an idiot if I format the HDD first.

Another case is when you get an internal HDD that is supposed to be unformatted. But you don't know if it is or isn't - not before you install it into your Windows box and power it up. If the HDD is blank, as it should be, then you need to format it, and all is well. However if it is already formatted for you and contains something, Windows has no way of knowing why it is so, and it will treat it as any other removable drive - namely, will read the autorun.inf and proceed running all the viruses in the world that the drive may contain, all that before you even realize that something is wrong.

In either case, if your antivirus finished loading by this time it may save you, if it is good enough. But I recall some recent review that claimed that a typical antivirus fails to catch as many as half of the viruses.

thems is fightin words

[slew]

Taiwan is the country that is a part of China

I think many folks in Taiwan would have an issue with this statement.

A quick history lesson. The aborignal people of taiwan are actually connected to the other oceania aborignes (e.g. native of the other islands like the philippines, malaysia, and indonesia). The mainland Ming and Qing dynasties (pre-cursors to modern china) never really considered the island as part of their "middle kingdom".

Meanwhile, the Dutch that colonized the island which they called Formosa (which is now Taiwan) to use as their base to trade with Japan. This was managed by the Dutch East India Company (Spain briefly tried to hone in on the island, but were driven out by the Dutch).

Eventually, the conflicts that led to the formation of modern china, spilled over to the island. Koxinga, a Ming dynasty warlord/general/rebel (born in japan to a mother who was japanese and a Ming dynasty general) overthrew the dutch on Formosa to establish a base for Ming dynasty rebels that wanted to re-take over the Qing dynasty. This event has historically been cited by the chinese as their historic claim over the island, but it seems no more valid than the Dutch claim which is basically moot (since as we know possesion is more than 9/10 of international law).

Of course the Japanese eventually defeated the Chinese in the Sino-Japanese war and the Qing ceded Taiwan to Japan as part of the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Japan basically occupied Taiwan until the end of WWII.

During the resolution of WWII and the Japanese surrender, basically, Japan was forced to give up all the territories that it gained all the way back from the end of WWI from the Republic of China which included the island of Formosa. The decision of who the territories should fall to were left up for the final Treaty of Peace with Japan which left the decision to the winners of WWII in the Pacific (basically the US, the UK and Soviet Union and the ROC).

Of course after WWII, this was all complicated as the Republic of China which was generally considered the KMT government at the time was overthrown by the People's Republic of China (Mao, etc) and the KMT government retreated and occupied Taiwan for many years claiming that they were still the KMT/ROC. That and the beginnings of the cold war power struggles led to the controversial Treaty of San Francisco which officially ended WWII in the pacific required that Japan cede Taiwan to one of the "winners" which due to a complicated set of circumstances, the ROC or the PRC were never specified (since they weren't invited to be part of the treaty because of the civil war at the time there was no agreement on who the government was).

In fact with some stretching, it's possible to conclude that the Treaty of San Francisco actually leaves Taiwan as an occupied territory of the United States (sort of like berlin was occupied by 4 powers at the end of the war in europe).

So it's actually debatable that Taiwan is even a country and if it is, if it is actually part of China or an independent country in it's own right...