If you are currently in the market for a new hard drive then you may want to think twice before buying a Seagate Maxtor Personal Storage 3200 as some come with an unwelcome free gift… a virus!
World of Warcraft players beware
A small number of drives shipped since August 2007 have the added ‘bonus’ of a virus called Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah which searches the drive for passwords, specifically ones for online games, such as WOW, and then forwards them to a remote server in China where they are presumably used for taking over gamer’s accounts.
If you have one of these drives that you have purchased in the last couple of months then you should contact Seagate in order to arrange a replacement.
Seagate are also offering a free 60 day trial of Kaspersky Anti-Virus, a quality program which is capable of flushing the virus out of the system.
How did it happen?
The reason why the hard drives became infected may be because Maxtor outsourced the work.
The company blames a Chinese contractor who, in turn, has passed the blame onto a sub-contractor in Thailand.
Whilst outsourcing may bring costs down, I guess this event shows the strong need to ensure quality controls are kept in place so that any economies made are not false.
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