14 DAY TRIAL // A virus has been disclosed by the Kaspersky company within the Maxtor 3200 Personal Storage - that's an external hard drive. Thing with it is that you get it for free, when purchasing the products. This is the second news item of this type that we had in the past ten days - last week we found out that some laptops sold by Medion in Denmark and Germany had the Stoned.Angelina virus, already installed on them, and now this.
The virus has been named "Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah" and it is known to delete MP3 files. I've seen similar viruses, so this is not something new, but what really boggles my mind is how the hell did it get on those hard drives? As you might already know, Maxtor has been recently acquired by Seagate. As I've seen on the Register, one of Seagate's spokesmen has stated that the 3200 does not have any software installed on it and that he knows of no virus that would live in the master boot record. I have to agree with him - I never heard of such a virus either, but if Kaspersky discovered this, then it just might be possible.
Seagate is now investigating this matter, and to be honest, I'm anxiously awaiting to see what they find. In any case, virus or not, do not lose trust in Maxtor, as they fabricate quality products. I remember I bought a 20 GB hard drive from them about 7 years ago. The damn thing still works!
Kaspersky is suspecting that the virus somehow got onto the drives during the assembly process. And they've also said that when you connect the hard drive to your computer and you click on the icon, the virus will "jump" on your machine. But, of course, if you have an AV, your machine won't get "hurt", so get one now!