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rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

Bureau warns on tainted discs

FOCUSED ATTACK: Large-capacity hard disks often used by government agencies were found to contain Trojan horse viruses, Investigation Bureau officials warned

Portable hard discs sold locally and produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology have been found to carry Trojan horse viruses that automatically upload to Beijing Web sites anything the computer user saves on the hard disc, the Investigation Bureau said.

Around 1,800 of the portable Maxtor hard discs, produced in Thailand, carried two Trojan horse viruses: autorun.inf and ghost.pif, the bureau under the Ministry of Justice said.

violent1

Worthless S.O.B.

rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

More info, here is a response to my post on Ruta's forum.

Apparently, the story is true. Here's the Seagate page:
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/personal_storage/ps 3200-sw

The effects of this virus are minimal. According to Kaspersky the virus is the Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah, a molar virus that searches for passwords to online games and sends them to a server located in China. It also deletes other molar viruses and can disable virus detection software. All of the known games affected are Chinese with the exception of World of Warcraft.

Another story said there was more payload, that the virus tries to delete mp3 files:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/19/maxtor_harddrives_include_viru s/

The Register news story is from September 2007. I would guess the infected drives are off the shelves now.

Ruta

sunny

rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

Well in spite of the above I went to Best Buy today and purchased a Maxtor exterior HDD they had on sale, 500GB for $119. I plugged it in and it killed my PC!! crybaby

Don't think the HDD is the problem though. Even before I plugged in the HDD I thought I smelled something burning, like electrical. After unplugging the Maxtor I tried to reboot and there was absolutely no response from the PC at all, except for the fans giving a few whirls from the tiny bit of power they get from the PSU, nothing from the mobo. After a few minutes I tried again and it did boot up and seemed fine but in a few minutes it shut down again.

I think this is a continuation or reoccurence of the problem I had a few months ago. Kind of a revisatation. LOL

Not sure what to do next other than unplug everything and have a good look see inside to see if I can find anything wrong, a burned place or something like that.

Crying or Very sad

mojo · Feb 03, 2007

I hope nothing is badly damaged!

rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

Changed out the power supply, a really big heavy daddy, five pounds of 600 W, and the PC took off like a jack rabbit!! I'm back up! Yahooooo!

Applause

mojo · Feb 03, 2007

Yay!!!!!!!!!!!! Dancing

rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

Yeah, you better believe it! I love my PC, all my RCF friends live in there.

Heart

fishead · Feb 09, 2005

119 is pretty cheap. Thats what I need.

I probably have one of those HDs mentioned at top with trojan., ever since I put that maxtar in it has acted wierd.

rb2d2 · Sep 25, 2004

fishead · Feb 09, 2005

I don't know rb, I read all those articals and what others said. Some say one should nuc any new ex HD. They also said it was the 500 gig hds because thats the size governments use. I think I would worry about the one you bought. I thought they said some made it to the us, but I could be wrong.