Posted by Virus Bulletin on Nov 12, 2007
External Maxtor disks shipped carrying autorun datastealer.
A shipment of Maxtor external hard drives, produced in Thailand by US-based Seagate and sold in Taiwan, has been found to be infected with Autorun trojans designed to gather sensitive data from machines connected to the storage devices.
The high-capacity (300GB and 500GB) drives in the Maxtor Basics range were shipped with the infection, consisting of an autorun.inf file pointing to the trojan body so that Windows systems will automatically activate it on connection to the device.
According to local reports, the Taiwanese government suspects Chinese involvement, as the devices are commonly used in government operations to provide data storage. Large amounts of sensitive government data are thought to have been harvested and passed on to websites based in China.
The same company faced a similar incident several months ago, when drives sold in the Netherlands were found to be infected. More information on the drives sold in Taiwan is in the Taipei Times here.
Posted on 12 November 2007 by Virus Bulletin
