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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.
Lead in paint, malware in HD's same thing really
Make SELinux enforcing again!
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. :-)
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!
Is this a news report or a trailer for a motion picture?
While the open source movement has done a great deal toward making software understandable, at some point, people have to trust their computers. However, this used to be a great deal easier, because engineers had a good idea of what could be done with a particular amount of circuitry.
The increasing level of integration means that hardware is more and more of a black box. While this has led to huge savings in cost and performance boosts, we've paid for it by being unable to debug the hardware, and unsure of what's really going on inside.
While the case in the article talks specifically about a trojan horse installed normally on the drive -- and thus something that should have been remedied by a good formatting job -- who knows what could happen once we have vulnerabilities embedded directly into the hardware. One could certainly imagine a trojan that was hard-coded in the firmward and kept moving itself around the disc after attempts to delete it.
It's also seems fishy that much sensitive information (of relevance to a foreign government) could be obtained from randomly putting trojans on hard drives... Isn't it possible that this was an unintentional infection from some disk-handling or testing machine along the line?
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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Please add to your host files:
127.0.0.1 www.nice8.org
127.0.0.1 www.we168.org
Something else like a... hard disk?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I once bought a computer with Windows preinstalled.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why oh why does Microsoft still automatically run software off any disk that's inserted into your PC? Surely decades of floppy-carried virii should have convinced them of what a frigging stupid idea that is?
Only if you disabled NTLDR as well....
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
By "Trojans Found In New HDs Sold In Taiwan", I thought they meant condoms.
(OK, who's the comedian? My catchpas is "durable".)
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.
3rd party tools? Who needs 3rd party tools?
gpedit.msc
It's a windows GUI tool.
Computer Configuration > Click "Administrative Templates" > Click "System" > Double-Click "Turn off Autoplay", set it for "All Drives" and click the "apply" button.
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.
[Troll]
That's the problem with Windows. It doesn't Just Work(tm). You have to know these cryptic menus to edit databases just to keep your new USB drive from running whatever application happens to be on it. Maybe one day Microsoft could start doing some real usability testing and get Windows to be as easy for a new user as Linux.
[/Troll]