Seagate warns of infected drives

The vendor said that the malware was discovered on the Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 model by researchers from security firm Kaspersky.

Seagate did not reveal how many infected drives had been sold, claiming only that it was "a small number".

The firm has halted production until all of the drives can be disinfected, and said that "inventory is being reworked" to retrieve infected drives shipped to retailers.

The Trojan was identified by Kaspersky as Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah. The malware steals password information for several Chinese online games, including World of Warcraft, and uploads the data to a remote server.

Virus.Win32.AutoRun.ah has also been known to disable antivirus software and delete any pre-existing viruses.

Seagate said that most consumer antivirus programs will be able to identify and clean the virus. Kaspersky is offering affected Seagate customers a free 60-day trial of its antivirus software in order to clean the drives.

This is not the first time that Seagate has shipped infected drives. The Stoned.Angelina virus made its way into Seagate's manufacturing plants in 1995 and infected a batch of IDE hard drives.

Stoned.Angelina resurfaced on a batch of laptops shipped by German PC vendor Medion earlier this year.