Usually, when we hear about attacks on computers, the threat comes from the web. Malicious code is dressed up, given a nice clean coat of HTML and placed on the Internet for unsuspecting victims to happen upon. It’s rare that we see an attack begin from the hardware side. That is just what is happening to owners of Seagate Technologies Maxtor Basic Hard drive.

About 1800 of these hard drives, which were originally manufactured in Thailand, come equipped with two Trojans: autorun.inf and ghost.pif. These bugs connect to the web and upload anything that you install on these devices to two websites, purportedly controlled by Chinese authorities. That means that everything from your iTunes MP3s to the Excel document containing your banking information might have found its way onto a server somewhere in Beijing.

Can I Get Spies With That?

I would not go as far as to call this cyber warfare, but it does make you wonder how safe our hardware is from malicious threats. Most of the focus in information security is on threats that come from the outside in, very little screening is done to ensure that the devices we use aren’t phoning home.

Maybe we should start to rethink this paradigm?

When technology and politics sleep in the same bed, there are bound to be conflicts. Worse yet, more of our devices are coming equipped with the ability to connect to the Internet. Sometimes, these connections are made without any real feedback from users.

Security companies and manufacturers need to start taking information integrity seriously. This time the threat was controlled and the Trojans were pretty easily spotted, but we currently have no real way of knowing how many other pieces of hardware could be compromised by similar virus’.

Web 2.0 Roundup

To keep yourself safe,

Be sure to virus check any new hardware you pick up that you plan to load sensitive information on.

Be alert. If your system starts to act strangely after you install something new, don’t take that for granted.

Be proactive. Every so often check to see if your computer is phoning home. If you need to know how, there is a guide here.

What do you think is the biggest threat to information security today?

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