Seagate hard drives turn into spy machines
Nick FarrellThe Inquirer Monday November 12, 2007
SEAGATE hard-drives, made in Thailand, are having trojan horse software pre-loaded, possibly in a spy effort by the Chinese government.
The Taiwanese Investigation Bureau claims that the Maxtor Basics 500G discs, which are used by government agencies, have been found to contain Trojan horse viruses that automatically upload to Beijing websites.
So far more than 1,800 of the portable Maxtor hard discs, carried two Trojan horse viruses: autorun.inf and ghost.pif.
The sites that the hard-drives call up and upload their data to are www.nice8.org and www.we168.org.
The attack is unusual, which leads the TIB to think that the Chinese government is involved.
Recently, the Chinese government has run an aggressive interweb spying programme in Taiwan.
The bureau has ordered the product's Taiwanese distributor, Xander International, to take the hard-drives from the shelves.
Xander told the Chinese-language Liberty Times that the company had sold 1,800 tainted discs to stores last month.
Seagate's Asian Pacific branch said it was investigating.
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