Hard Drives Sold with Pre-Installed Trojans
I don’t know if this story is true:
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.
Certainly possible.
EDITED TO ADD (12/14): A first-hand account.
Alex • November 20, 2007 1:17 PM
Kind of doubt it. Seems like potentially way too much data to go unnoticed for long, unless some sort of filtering is performed on file name / size.