Seagate`s hard drives contain trojans

18th November 2007

According to Taipei Times, referring to the information from the United States Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, about 1800 items of hard drives from Seagate Basics 500G series Maxtor used in government departments of USA, contain a trojan program. The worm automatically uploads all the information on disks to the sites www.nice8.org and www.we168.org located in Peking.
The specialists involved in the investigation point out, that drives by Seagate production of such volume are often used in the government organizations in databases. FBI even suspect that the case may involve Chinese secret services, though it is known for sure that this models were assembled in the Thai territory.
The first complaints about the availability of the trojan program on an entirely new hard drives in the FBI were received in last month. After clarifying the details, the FBI agents contacted the Taiwanese distributor of the abovementioned models, which distributed the infected disks, the company Xander International. Currently, about 1500 units of Seagate Maxtor Basics 500G have been taken out of sale. A further investigation is taking place. Specialists note that it is the first time that malware has been recorded to hard drive before they went on the sale.