Maxtor USB Hard Drives Ship Virus Infected

This week we learned that Seagate had been selling Maxtor branded drives that left its Chinese manufacturing facility infected with a virus. It seems that as viruses go, this one wasn’t particularly malicious, unless you were a WoW player with a good account.

The virus was only interested in gaming related passwords, though some reports of the virus deleting MP3 files have surfaced. Seagate is offering owners of infected Maxtor basic hard drives free anti-virus software, which will detect and remove the virus from the hard drives. Seagate originally thought the virus was planted maliciously by an employee, but later discovered it was an accidental infection. Seagate says it is implementing new security measures to prevent this from happening again including metal detectors to ensure employees have no flash drives on their person.