Bureau warns on tainted discs

Hard disks sold in Taiwan contained trojan horse programs. The Taipei Times reports:

Portable hard discs sold locally and produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology have been found to carry Trojan horse viruses that automatically upload to Beijing Web sites anything the computer user saves on the hard disc, the Investigation Bureau said.

Around 1,800 of the portable Maxtor hard discs, produced in Thailand, carried two Trojan horse viruses: autorun.inf and ghost.pif, the bureau under the Ministry of Justice said. The tainted portable hard disc uploads any information saved on the computer automatically and without the owner’s knowledge to www.nice8.org and www.we168.org, the bureau said.

Chinese spying or manufacturer’s blunder? It seems odd that hard disks would have been infected before even being sold.

November 25th 2007 InfoWar, International, News Monitor