Australian ALDIs Sell Conficker-Infected Hard Drives

mukimu writes "Supermarket ALDI has been selling malware-infected hard drives in Australian stores, prompting the country's Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT) to issue a security alert to users on behalf of the government. ALDI has had to issue a recall on the products, which contained components of Conficker, and remove the product from its stores. AusCERT noted that the worm should be picked up by antivirus given it is extremely old and past its heyday when it infected Australian Banks and transport infrastructure."

Comments

Damned German chains...

[lewko]

And whatever you do, don't mention the war.

I smell a discount!

[jwijnands]

I'd take it for half price and clean it myself. After cleaning most of a rather large windows estate of conficker I think I still remember how to do it.

Re:I smell a discount!

[maxwell demon]

Shouldn't a simple reformat (i.e. rewriting the file system structures) already take care of it? OK, to be completely sure, also rewrite the MBR (there might be a boot sector virus on the disk as well). But I don't see the need to overwrite everything on the disk. It's not private or secret data you want to hide from others. You don't need to erase every trace of it; you just need to make sure the computer won't execute it.

Re:I smell a discount!

[sakdoctor]

I'd mark up the price of clean drives as "Virus free", (ala DRM free), and sell the standard drive as "Free virus".

Re:Are they selling used hard drives?

[rbrausse]

new hardware with pre-installed malware is rare but not unheard of. a short search shows external drives, photo frames and laptops.

Re:Are they selling used hard drives?

[hairyfeet]

Actually I can easily explain it. You see China has one of the highest rates of Windows piracy bar none and I have no doubt those machines on the floor putting the little free crap they always seem to put on drives (like backup software, or those little app launcher thingies) are running "Windows XP Corporate SP2 Reloaded Edition" and haven't seen a single patch since they downloaded the .ISO.

So all it takes is someone playing an infected CD, surfing on the thing, or even being paid by some malware group to plug in an infected drive and the Windows is pwned. After that any drive plugged into it gets infected and voila! hell it wouldn't surprise me if they made an image to flash the drives and the machine doing the imaging has more viruses than a Bangkok whore on a Saturday night. stupid is as stupid does I suppose.