Why plugging in new hard drives sucks in Windows...

[skimike]

Upon a warning from the security team from Kaspersky Labs, Seagate has now issued a 'mea culpa' in which is advising those who have purchased a Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 hard drive since August 2007 to check them, if they haven't already, for viruses.

The infected drives come from a sub-contract manufacturer located in China and are 'equipped' with Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah, a molar virus that searches for passwords to online games and sends them to a server that is, coincidentally in China. Most anti-virus programs have already been updated and will find the virus easily. Just be sure to scan the drive.

Original article is here with the well-buried warning from Seagate here.

From Seagate:

The effects of this virus are minimal. According to Kaspersky the virus is the Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah, a molar virus that searches for passwords to online games and sends them to a server located in China. It also deletes other molar viruses and can disable virus detection software. All of the known games affected are Chinese with the exception of World of Warcraft. The following games are affected.

WSGame
91.com
QQ
Woool
rxjh.17game.com
TianLongBaBu
AskTao
Perfect World (Wanmei Shijie)
World of Warcraft

The effects of the virus are minimal.

I'd love to see them explain that to the guy who just lost several years of progress in WoW because he plugged in his new Seagate hard drive and it happily installed a password interceptor on his system and shipped off all his information to some Chinese gold farmers.

If you haven't disabled AutoRun by now, you might want to give it a second thought.

[Kiyumi]

Wth.. Chinese farmers stop at nothing, do they? I'm surprised they don't have Lineage 2 on there.