Chinese Trojan on Maxtor HDDs spooks Taiwan

I'd say another reason ...

another reason to STOP manufacturing HDD's in China! It's like if the US had manufactured all its deathware in the USSR back in the Cold War.

Anyway, it should be standard to do a HD wipe even if your HDD is new. Not so hard to do it: dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda should do the trick.

another reason to get kaspersky

by far best anit virus protection there is and they have a mental offer on at mo. i got 3 pc's protected for 2 year for £27.....mental!

@Daniel B.

> Not so hard to do it: dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda should do the trick.

Exactly. But by using the OS capable of running this, you wouldn't be affected in the first place... ;)

There is no reason

the people responsible for this should expect to get away with it, unless it is state sanctioned. I don't think time in a Chinese prison would be worth a million passwords and of course there are all those hanging judges they have. Taiwan is right to be suspicious.

@vodka

Mental? Somebody shoot him.

blind man leading a blind man...

Well, I always thought both Maxtor and Seagate drives were s#@t. And this isn't the first time Seagate-Maxtor shipped a drive with a virus in it either.

When Seagate gobbled up Maxtor, the following quote came into my mind: "Isn't that like a blind man leading a blind man? Won't both of them fall into a hole"?

Initially, Seagate expressed skepticism about the reports.

Nice, so they're shipping enormous quantities of HDDs, yet can afford to take risks with their customers data by being skeptical. Why not just stop that distribution channel immediately until any doubt had been removed?

(CAUTION: unnecessary OS fanboy troll-bait ahead)

Windows/Linux/Mac, who gives a shit, variety is the spice of life, it's about what gets the work done. Weaknesses in operating systems have a correlation with the number of users using them. If there aren't anywhere near as many vulnerablilites on LInux/Mac compared to Windows, it's because no criminals have spent the time looking for them as they don't pay very well, yet. (yes, I know the communities of both spend a lot of time looking for vulnerabilities (as does the Windows community) and the fact that the code is open to peer review is contributory towards their having the potential to be more secure, but given a large enough userbase as to make it profitable to write virii for these systems, are you going to tell me that some enterprising criminals are not capable of writing exploits for these systems too?). In other words, if the entire population used Linux, would virii dissappear? I think not.

Just be careful, whatever platform you entrust your 1's and 0's to!

@troll-bait

>In other words, if the entire population used Linux, would virii dissappear?

No, you'd need to use VMS for that to happen

.

How do I..

Use this command on an internal HD ?

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda (sorry I am newbie)

VMS

Care to elaborate?

Excuse my utter ignorance of VMS systems, but after a quick read of the Wikipedia (not definitive I'm sure) article on OpenVMS, particularly the Security section and the common criteria page linked therein, it seems that security on these models is still user/programmer dependant. Therefore all it takes is a lazy admin/user and a rootkit? to exploit even these systems?

http://secunia.com/product/6052/?task=statistics_2007

Every lock has a key and i'll say again, if all the world used VMS, would exploits disappear?

@How do I

> Use this command on an internal HD ? dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/hda

Substitute the name of your external drive for hda. Most distributions will pop up a window as you connect an external drive, and this usually includes the '/dev/hd...' information required. You may see '/dev/sd...' instead, depending on your distribution. Same difference, just implemented with SCSI emulation (or actually is SCSI!).

Coincidence?

Hmmm. Seagate are closing a plant in Northern Ireland. I wonder if anything Spooky went on there?