Pre-installed viruses from China

[cyflyer]

Well I bet this explains a lot of shit happening to peoples' computers.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/ptech/03/13/factory.installed.virus.ap/index.html

[kadzbiz]

Interesting.

[wtsinnc]

Various articles about this have appeared over the past several months. (Link).

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/11/2246246

[wtsinnc]

Another article (Nov.'07) about this.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9046424

[cyflyer]

With the hard drives surely that can only happen if the OS is also pre-installed and you just fire up the computer and go ? If its a blank hard drive which will have OS installed at destination, will those viruses still survive ?

[wtsinnc]

I don't know for sure about a full wipe eliminating factory installed malware. Seeing that the rootkit has been identified, you would think that security software vendors would include in their periodic updates specific detection capability for it. I own several Maxtor HDDs as well as one Seagate and others from Western Digital, Samsung, and Hitachi but the largest capacity drive I own is 200gb. My feeling is that there is a good possibility that hard drives of any capacity/format/speed from any manufacturer are suspect. Paranoia, I suppose, but better to be alert to the possibility. All of my drives have been thoroughly scanned with Kaspersky 6 and 7 antivirus, the Eset and F-Secure online scanners (the F-Secure scanner includes Blacklight), A-Squared and Hijack This plus anti-rootkit scans with Bitdefender and Avira. Two hard drives purchased brand new were wiped with DBAN, then fully formatted prior to installing the O/S and programs. If malware installed during the manufacturing process still exists, it is beyond my capability to remove.