Seagate warns of infected drives

Seagate is warning users to scan their systems for malware after a password-stealing Trojan was found on some of its hard drives.

The vendor said that the malware was discovered on the Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 model by researchers from security firm Kaspersky.

Seagate did not reveal how many infected drives had been sold, claiming only that it was "a small number".

The firm has halted production until all of the drives can be disinfected, and said that "inventory is being reworked" to retrieve infected drives shipped to retailers.

The Trojan was identified by Kaspersky as Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah. The malware steals password information for several Chinese online games, including World of Warcraft, and uploads the data to a remote server.

Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah has also been known to disable antivirus software and delete any pre-existing viruses.

Seagate said that most consumer antivirus programs will be able to identify and clean the virus. Kaspersky is offering affected Seagate customers a free 60-day trial of its antivirus software in order to clean the drives.

This is not the first time that Seagate has shipped infected drives. The Stoned.Angelina virus made its way into Seagate's manufacturing plants in 1995 and infected a batch of IDE hard drives.

Stoned.Angelina resurfaced on a batch of laptops shipped by German PC vendor Medion earlier this year.

See also:

Russian hacker network goes underground

Russian Business Network ups sticks, probably to Asia  12 Nov 2007

Mutant Trojans threaten Mac users

Malware authors tweaking payload, say researchers  08 Nov 2007

Cyber-criminals launch PDF malware offensive

PDFex storms into the charts  01 Nov 2007

Trojan attacks jump 500 per cent

Microsoft report warns of sharp hike in cyber attacks  23 Oct 2007

Storm Worm may have blown itself out

University researcher claims the Zhelatin Trojan is dying down  22 Oct 2007

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