Major Australian Retailer Accused of Selling Infected Hard Drives

skegg writes "Dick Smith, a major Australian electronics retailer, is being accused of regularly selling used hard drives as new. Particularly disturbing is the claim that at least one drive contained malware-infested pirated movies, causing the unlucky buyer significant data loss. Apparently the Fair Trading Commissioner will be conducting an investigation."

Comments

DSE distributing pirated media?

[jamesh]

DSE distributing pirated media? I'm sure the recording industry will be very interested to hear about this...

As a former employee...

[Anonymous Coward]

...this kind of thing was prevalent throughout the company. We would frequently be expected to sell used and returned stock without being given any real freedom in regards to marking it down. This led to a culture of lying to customers, especially in cases where it was not evident that the stock had been used.

Of course, used stock would be sold as new to customers all the time.

It even extended to returns on products that were in sealed packaging, despite having a clearly posted 14 day no questions asked refund policy we would be expected to tell customers that we wouldn't provide a refund, even if it was something that wasn't functioning as the customer expected (although within manufacturers specs).

Re:Standard Practice

[Kjella]

Which is also why SQL injection attacks exist, everything you send to the server is data. If you take that data and execute it as code, well duh you've just created an exploit. Never, ever trust anything coming from the user.