Seagate and maxtor HDs preloaded with Trojans

[Buffalo Six]

GSGKT writes

"About 1,800 brand new 300-GB or 500-GB external hard drives made for Maxtor in Thailand were found to have trojan horse malwares pre-installed (autorun.inf and ghost.pif). When the HD is in use, these forward information on the disk to two websites in Beijing, China: www.nice8.org or www.we168.org. The article implies that authorities believe the Chinese government is behind the trojans. A later article pins down the point of infection to a subcontractor company in China. A couple of months back the Register was reporting on pre-installed malware detected on Maxtor disks sold in the Netherlands. This earlier report was downplayed by a Seagate spokesman."

The more recent Taipei Times article says that Seagate admits the problem on its Web site, but a search there turns up nothing.

[VEGETA]

good thing I always format new drives right out of the box

[Gator]

Yep, they always ship with FAT32 (oh, that's not the virus/malware they're talking about) ... first thing I do is reformat. Plus, we've all turned off autorun on our systems, right?