An undisclosed number of Seagate’s Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 units have shipped with a virus that steals passwords to online games—including World of Warcraft—the company is warning customers.
Seagate got the head’s up from Kaspersky Labs, which identified the virus as Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah. The virus deletes similar viruses and can disable virus detection software as well.
According to the company, the issue only affects a small number of units produced by a Maxtor sub-contract manufacturer located in China. The company states that the problem at the Chinese facility has already been solved and the new units don’t have such a “feature”.
It seems that this incident was a special dedication for Chinese MMO gamers, as the virus mainly affect Chinese titles (well, that and World of Warcraft). Seagate’s list of affected games features the following:
- WSGame
- 91.com
- Woool
- rxjh.17game.com
- TianLongBaBu
- AskTao
- Perfect World (Wanmei Shijie)
- World of Warcraft
This isn’t the first time that subcontractors have been blamed for virus infections on storage media. A year ago, Apple shipped a number of Video iPod systems infected with a virus. The company blamed a contract manufacturer for the problem.
Security experts say that it’s easy for this kind of thing to happen, if one PC in the testing, manufacturing and quality assurance chain is infected. In the iPod video case, the hard drives were infected with Windows-based virus.
