Malware preinstalled on new Maxtor hard drives

Da Funky Munky

Source: Cnet

The Taipei Times is reporting that around 1,800 new 300GB and 500GB external hard drives manufactured by Maxtor shipped with malware on them. What makes this story even more interesting is that Taiwanese authorities suspected that Chinese authorities were involved.

“The bureau said that hard discs with such a large capacity are usually used by government agencies to store databases and other information. Sensitive information may have already been intercepted by Beijing through the two Web sites. That the method of attack was unusual, adding that it suspected Chinese authorities were involved. In recent years, the Chinese government has run an aggressive spying program relying on information technology and the Internet. This was the first time it had found that Trojan horse viruses had been placed on hard discs before they even reach the market.”

Now I’m not a security expert or anything like that, but doesn’t everyone format the hard drive before you install your OS on it? Of course you can use it just like storage device, and in that case something like that would be probably possible…

Ruu_Old

Formatting won't remove everything anyway even when people do so before installing an OS, it could be recovered.

SeanW

It's external hard drives which means they're likely to be pre-formatted for storage.

Secondly, the malware could be hidden in the firmware. Which would make it next to impossible to remove.

Maxtor HDs are ****e anyway.