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SEAGATE hard-drives, made in Thailand, are having trojan horse software pre-loaded, possibly in a spy effort by the Chinese government
So far more than 1,800 of the portable Maxtor hard discs, carried two Trojan horse viruses: autorun.inf and ghost.pif
So far more than 1,800 of the portable Maxtor hard discs, carried two Trojan horse viruses: autorun.inf and ghost.pif
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.
PASSWORDS
When the virus accesses software, it looks for gaming passwords and deletes mp3 files.
The publication asked Seagate to verify the information, but a company spokesperson said: "This scenario seems unlikely because the 3200 does not have any software preloaded on the drive so there is not an opportunity for a virus to be loaded. Yes, the drive is formatted, but I have never heard of a virus that lives in the master boot record."
The Register said that Kaspersky Labs believes the virus is installed as soon as a user installs the drive and double clicks on its icon.
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Originally posted by rapturas
Im not saying that there is spy software pre installed, just that whatever you buy, the advertised space is never the space you have available =]
Originally posted by rapturas
reply to post by Copernicus
Interesting stuff but thats referring to Data-Recovery and the theory behind how data is written. im referring to brand new, never used before HDD's and memory cards such as SD, Pro DUO etc. If you buy a brand new HDD or memory card and without writing any data to it be sure that the specified storage capacity (as advertised) is not the total amount you will be able to assign data to =] im sure its harmless but was very annoying for me when I first found out. I thought, why not advertise it as 296GB's of storage instead of 300GB's if you are only able to physically use 296GB? im sure there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for it so I wont rant anymore lol
For my SD card, say you have a file that is 1.98 or 1.99GB's in size and you have a 2GB memory card, you wont be able to store that file on your memory card due to lack of space. That was the annoying thing for me but i got over it =]
edit: oops didnt see the above post. must be the The Master Boot Record (MBR) then www.dewassoc.com...
[edit on 12-11-2007 by rapturas]
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.
The effects of this virus are minimal.