Special Christmas Gift from Maxtor: Buy a HDD and Get a Free... Virus?!

OK, that's smart. Seriously, have you ever thought that you can infect your computer by installing a brand new HDD on your computer? No more spam messages, no more malicious links, no more nothing. Just pay for a Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 and you're infected. Simple as that. But how can this happen? It seems like the folks at Segate didn't notice that some of their devices are infected with a pretty dangerous virus which attempts to steal your... game passwords. But not any game because Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah targets World of Warcraft, QQ, AskTao and some other well-known names. The virus was discovered by Kaspersky, one of the most popular antivirus developers in the world.

"Kaspersky Labs, a maker of anti-virus software, has alerted Seagate to the existence of a virus found on at least one Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 product. Seagate has traced this issue to a small number of units produced by a Maxtor sub-contract manufacturer located in China," Seagate wrote in a notification published on its main page.

"All units now leaving the facility in question have been cleared of the virus and units in inventory are being reworked before being released for sale. However, some affected units may have been sold to the public before the problem was detected. Seagate apologizes for the inconvenience that has been caused as a result of this incident."

According to the reports, the virus attempts to disable the antivirus protection and steal the passwords of the games mentioned above. The information was then sent to a China server. At this time, most antivirus developers already updated their products to discover the threat and remove it. Among the 28 security companies able to discover Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah, we can mention McAfee, Kaspersky, Sophos, F-Secure, ESET NOD32, Microsoft and many others.

In case you are one of the unlucky guys with an infected device, you can always call the Seagate support to provide your Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 serial number in order to get more information on this topic.