Seagate warns of infected drives

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".

The firm has halted production until all of the drives can be disinfected, and said that "inventory is being reworked" to retrieve infected drives shipped to retailers. The Trojan was identified by Kaspersky as Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah. The malware steals password information for several Chinese online games, including World of Warcraft, and uploads the data to a remote server. Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah has also been known to disable antivirus software and delete any pre-existing viruses.

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