It appears that Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 hard drives sold after August to be infected with a virus. Yes, off the shelf brand new hard discs could carry a potential security threat.
Following findings by the Investigation Bureau that portable hard discs produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology that were sold in Taiwan contained Trojan horse viruses, further investigations suggested that "contamination" took place when the products were in the hands of Chinese subcontractors during the manufacturing process.
Anti-virus software manufacturer Kaspersky Labs also issued a similar warning. The hard drive has been temporarily pulled off the shelves and is no longer available for purchase.
The Investigation Bureau said the tainted portable hard drives automatically upload any information saved on the computer to Beijing Web sites without the user's knowledge.
While investigating a Chinese subcontractor involved in the manufacturing process, Seagate found that a small number of drives were infected with the viruses. The company said the products from the problem factory had been scanned and all viruses had been eliminated, adding that all inventory would also be treated before the product was returned to stores.
Seagate did not disclose the stage in the manufacturing process where the Chinese subcontractor installed the Trojan horse.
Seagate recommended that all customers who had purchased the product install protective anti-virus software.
To this end, Seagate said that Kaspersky Labs would offer all Seagate customers a 60-day fully functional version of the Kaspersky Lab Anti-Virus 7.0 software for download and installation.
In September, the British online information technology magazine The Register published information saying that Kaspersky Labs had found a pre-installed virus named Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah on Maxtor 3200 external hard drives sold in the Netherlands.
