Infected Seagate hard drives sold in Taiwan
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.
12 November 2007
Tags:
china, malware, taiwan, trojan.
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