Malware infected segate drives

[Dark Atheist]

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".

source

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2203373/seagate-warns-infected-drives

 

[Geffy]

would these not be nuked by formatting the drive?

 

[Xie]

would these not be nuked by formatting the drive?

I would think so. Malware on a flash drive I could see as a problem, as people buy them and use them right away. Unless these were used as a secondary drive on a Windows system ...

 

[Geffy]

So the real likelihood of being caught out by this is pretty small.

 

[Dark Atheist]

unless they are prefortmated and shiped to oems, story wasnt overly clear on where when or how, even if it was in the mbr

 

[LeeJend]

It was a boot sector virus that detects and disables AV. A normal formatting does not wipe the boot sector.

 

[j79zlr]

I don't think it was a boot sector virus. From the descriptions of it that I've read, it is simply an autorun.inf that is ran if you plug the drive into a Windows Operating System infected PC. The autorun then installs the virus. Simply formatting the drive should get rid of it.