Seaget Ships Virus-Laden Hard Drives

Seaget Ships Virus-Laden Hard Drives

Oh, that familiar refrain: something from China that's harmful. In this case, for once it's not a set of toys covered in lead paint. It's hard drives that have been infected at the manufacturer with a virus.

Seagate has posted a warning on its website about its Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 hard drives. According to the posting, Seagate traced the issue to a "small number" of units produced by a Maxtor Chinese sub-contractor.

The virus in question is the Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah virus, which "searches for passwords for online games and sends them to a server located in China. Hard to believe that's what they would be interested in, but online games are big business, and one of the games searched for is World of Warcraft.

Although it's easy to laugh because it's a Chinese sub-contractor, security experts say that it's easy for this kind of thing to happen. All it takes is just one PC in the testing, manufacturing, and QA chain to be infected. Perhaps they were using Microsoft's Windows Live