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Norton, McAfee and Kaspersky Fighting for Seagate's HDD Security

Improved security for Seagate's hard drives

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

19th of November 2007, 08:42 GMT

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Kaspersky Antivirus to protect Seagate's devices

The short story so far: Seagate delivered approximately 1,800 Maxtor Basics 3200 hard-drives which were apparently infected with a dangerous Trojan attempting to steal users' credentials. The interesting fact is that nobody said a thing until the Taiwan government accused the Chinese authorities of trying to access their private information as the devices were supposed to be used by their officials. Seagate confirmed that some of the hard drives reached the

customers but it stated that only a few of them were infected as the production process was stopped as soon as they received the reports.

It appears that security vendor Kaspersky informed Seagate before the Taiwanese reaction but today, the hard-drive manufacturer came out to give some hot details about the case. According to Gizmodo, a source inside the company declared that the entire infection was caused by an employee who transferred the Trojan on the devices by mistake.

"The internal investigation by the contract manufacturer determined that the virus was accidentally transferred by one of its employees and not a malicious act," the source said for Gizmodo. "Investigation...showed it was a threat to gaming passwords only and that a virus scan...would rid the drive-and any system attached to it-of the virus. Also, there have been some references to the virus deleting MP3s. Although it is a minor inaccuracy, this is also incorrect. The original suspicion out of Kaspersky Labs was that MP3s were being deleted by the virus, but tests have since proved that it does not," Maxtor commented the investigation.

Moreover, it seems like the folks at Seagate introduced some new security measures supposed to prevent such thing from happening again in the future. From now on, all the devices produced by the company will be delivered with no files inside the root directory to avoid potential infections. In addition, the hard-drives will be scanned with three top security solutions compared with only one product used before the case. The chosen ones are Norton, McAfee and Kaspersky.

And one more thing: the Seagate officials are pretty paranoiac these days and introduced even several metal detectors for the employees with access to the testing computers in order to avoid unauthorized transfers.

In addition to all these security measures, the affected Seagate customers can download a special flavor of Kaspersky Antivirus to remove the infection and keep their information protected. The download is available on this page.

TAGS:

seagate | maxtor | virus | infection | security

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