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back to article Chinese Trojan on Maxtor HDDs spooks Taiwan

Confirmation that a Maxtor hard disk drive was infected with a Trojan by a manufacturing sub-contractor in China is spooking Taiwanese authorities, one of the countries where examples of the infected kit have begun to appear. As first reported by El Reg in September a pre-installed Trojan named AutoRun-AH was discovered by …

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  1. vincent himpe
    Go

    another reason

    to turn of AUTORUN on your machine and ALWAYS perform a full FORMAT when you buy external media like memory sticks and Hardddrives.

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  2. Daniel B.

    I'd say another reason ...

    another reason to STOP manufacturing HDD's in China! It's like if the US had manufactured all its deathware in the USSR back in the Cold War.

    Anyway, it should be standard to do a HD wipe even if your HDD is new. Not so hard to do it: dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda should do the trick.

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  3. vodka

    another reason to get kaspersky

    by far best anit virus protection there is and they have a mental offer on at mo. i got 3 pc's protected for 2 year for £27.....mental!

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  4. BitTwister

    @Daniel B.

    > Not so hard to do it: dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda should do the trick.

    Exactly. But by using the OS capable of running this, you wouldn't be affected in the first place... ;)

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    There is no reason

    the people responsible for this should expect to get away with it, unless it is state sanctioned. I don't think time in a Chinese prison would be worth a million passwords and of course there are all those hanging judges they have. Taiwan is right to be suspicious.

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @vodka

    Mental? Somebody shoot him.

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  7. Andrew Woodhead
    Alert

    Virus?

    My OS is incabableof getting this too. Sorry Windows users

    Stung again HAHA

    Peace

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  8. Lee Chong Yew

    blind man leading a blind man...

    Well, I always thought both Maxtor and Seagate drives were s#@t. And this isn't the first time Seagate-Maxtor shipped a drive with a virus in it either.

    When Seagate gobbled up Maxtor, the following quote came into my mind: "Isn't that like a blind man leading a blind man? Won't both of them fall into a hole"?

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  9. TeeCee Gold badge
    Coat

    WTF?

    ".....fueling espionage fears."

    I can see it now. Chinese ultimatum to Taiwan: "Surrender now. We have your online gaming passwords and if you don't comply we'll, er, oh, ah, can we get back to you on this.........?"

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  10. b166er

    Initially, Seagate expressed skepticism about the reports.

    Nice, so they're shipping enormous quantities of HDDs, yet can afford to take risks with their customers data by being skeptical. Why not just stop that distribution channel immediately until any doubt had been removed?

    (CAUTION: unnecessary OS fanboy troll-bait ahead)

    Windows/Linux/Mac, who gives a shit, variety is the spice of life, it's about what gets the work done. Weaknesses in operating systems have a correlation with the number of users using them. If there aren't anywhere near as many vulnerablilites on LInux/Mac compared to Windows, it's because no criminals have spent the time looking for them as they don't pay very well, yet. (yes, I know the communities of both spend a lot of time looking for vulnerabilities (as does the Windows community) and the fact that the code is open to peer review is contributory towards their having the potential to be more secure, but given a large enough userbase as to make it profitable to write virii for these systems, are you going to tell me that some enterprising criminals are not capable of writing exploits for these systems too?). In other words, if the entire population used Linux, would virii dissappear? I think not.

    Just be careful, whatever platform you entrust your 1's and 0's to!

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  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @troll-bait

    >In other words, if the entire population used Linux, would virii dissappear?

    No, you'd need to use VMS for that to happen

    .

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  12. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    oww err

    i feel even better now for buying lacie!

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  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How do I..

    Use this command on an internal HD ?

    dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda (sorry I am newbie)

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  14. b166er

    VMS

    Care to elaborate?

    Excuse my utter ignorance of VMS systems, but after a quick read of the Wikipedia (not definitive I'm sure) article on OpenVMS, particularly the Security section and the common criteria page linked therein, it seems that security on these models is still user/programmer dependant. Therefore all it takes is a lazy admin/user and a rootkit? to exploit even these systems?

    http://secunia.com/product/6052/?task=statistics_2007

    Every lock has a key and i'll say again, if all the world used VMS, would exploits disappear?

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  15. BitTwister

    @How do I

    > Use this command on an internal HD ? dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda

    Substitute the name of your external drive for hda. Most distributions will pop up a window as you connect an external drive, and this usually includes the '/dev/hd...' information required. You may see '/dev/sd...' instead, depending on your distribution. Same difference, just implemented with SCSI emulation (or actually is SCSI!).

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  16. amanfromMars Silver badge

    Coincidence?

    Hmmm. Seagate are closing a plant in Northern Ireland. I wonder if anything Spooky went on there?

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