In Taiwan, new Seagate Maxtor Basics hard drives carry malware, reports Taipei Times. The infected drives have a 500GB capacity and were reportedly manufactured in Thailand.

The article in the Taipei Times points to China as the culprit behind this fiasco as the malware found in the infected drives upload information from affected systems to Web sites with a .cn domain. Trend Micro Network Architect Paul Ferguson points out that while China may be the prime suspect, it could altogether be a different entity as one of the hosts point to Dallas, Texas [75.{BLOCKED}.{BLOCKED}.113] and the other to Korea [222.{BLOCKED}.{BLOCKED}.190]. Ferguson acknowledges, however, that it’s easy for cybercriminals to register domans in China and have the actual hosts geographically elsewhere.

Trend Micro detects the malware found in the infected hard drives as follows:

• BKDR_AGENT.ZYG
• BKDR_AGENT.ZYJ
• BKDR_BIFROSE.AZF
• WORM_AUTORUN.QW
• WORM_AUTORUN.FW
• WORM_AUTORUN.VE
• WORM_AUTORUN.VF

Taiwanese authorities have instructed Seagate’s Taiwan distributor to remove the affected products from store shelves immediately.

Continuing enmity between Taiwan and China maybe behind the finger-pointing but several malware lurking in new suppose-to-be-clean hardware is another, more pressing, reality for computingdom. Another door has been opened for malware. For now, the only window open for information security is the immediate scanning of newly bought computers against “pre-natal infection.”