Maxtor malware debacle explained

Last week, we heard a rather unsettling tale of how nearly 2000 Maxtor Personal Storage 3200 drives shipped with the Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah virus on board. How exactly does something like that happen? Gizmodo decided to investigate and got the scoop straight from the horse's mouth. "Reuters reported that it was a Seagate disk discovered in Taiwan, but the truth is, the Maxtor Basics 3200 (aka PS 3200) is available all over the world, and the infected lot made its way to many regions including China, Russia and the Middle East. Our source confirmed that the problem was discovered internally almost two months ago, and only boiled over last week when the Taiwanese government got mad at China." A full internal investigation then revealed that the virus originated at a factory in China, where it was "accidentally transferred" on to production drives by a Seagate employee. If you've got one of the affected drives, head over to Seagate's PS3200 support page for your free copy of Kaspersky Anti-Virus 7.0.

For more on the drive debacle:
- see this Gizmodo article