I have been finding lately that my hard drives are getting as crowded as the inside of my head, so I decided to buy myself a storage solution. I decided upon a Maxtor 500GB USB external hard drive, figuring that this would hold all my digital books, art and music, and was fairly cheap for the price.
I had three external hard disks of varying sizes all full up already, so it was about time that I did something like this; Maxtor has a good reputation, and all of the products I've had from them in the past have been trustworthy.
So I got the brand new Maxtor drive, plugged it into a USB port to get it formatted and set up...Autorun kicks in, and scans the drive...and the next thing I know, my protection software is telling me that a trojan is installing itself on my system (that it can't block).
Now, being that I'm relatively experienced in the ways of IT, I couldn't work out how this could happen, considering this was a brand new drive, literally just out of the packaging...there's no way that any reputable manufacturer would ship out hardware that comes pre-installed with malware...right?
And then I notice that my system is running VERY slowly, and worse...one of my other external hard disks was now unreachable, effectively destroying 45Gb of valuable data.
I've spent the last week or so trying to get my system back to baseline operational again ( I finally formatted and re-installed last night), and as yet I have been unable to access the data on the hard disk; I am at the point where I can see the data, but I can't copy it off of the drive. I'm taking a friend's suggestion of installing Ubuntu Linux and seeing if I can't copy the files that way.
Otherwise, it's looking that I'm going to have to pay for a physical data recovery (for the un-initiated, this is where techs crack open a hard drive and pull out the thin "platters" that sit inside, which requires a clean room to do - a space which is environmentally controlled and 100% free of dust). This will cost anywhere from $1000 to $9000.
I'm stumped as to how a Trojan arrives on a brand new external drive, so I do some research:
Chinese Trojan on Maxtor HDD spooks Taiwan
Kapersky: Maxtor markets password-pilfering Dutch disk drives
Yes, it turns out that Maxtor is having some "issues" at its manufacturing plant, because these drives
are being shipped with viruses, trojans and other malware on them. The one that was on mine was Trojan-Phisher-Lineage, a phishing Trojan that may harvest personal information such as usernames and passwords in order to access financial accounts. Unfortunately for the trojan, it worked counterintuitively by crippling my system to the point where I couldn't do online banking or sign into email...so it was denied access to the data it was designed to farm.
Long story short - if you're thinking of buying something to back up data,
DO NOT BUY any Maxtor product until this is 100% resolved. I cannot stress this enough. I would also recommend backing everything up by burning it to DVD - this is what I'm going to be doing from now on - use +R or +RW formats, because they both have good file recovery systems built in; the -R/-RW aren't so good.
I've also changed out my antivirus/anti-spyware protection for NOD32 Smart Security.
Posting this up here in the hope that this particular digital nightmare never ever happens to any of you.
Linear Mode
