US intelligence officials have long feared that outsourcing electronic component construction would allow a hostile intelligence service like China’s to plant real “spy” ware that would pilfer US secrets without our knowledge. This story out of Taiwan would seem to suggest that these fears are not totally unfounded:
Portable hard discs sold [in Taiwan] and produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology have been found to carry Trojan horse viruses that automatically upload to Beijing Web sites anything the computer user saves on the hard disc, the Investigation Bureau said.
Around 1,800 of the portable Maxtor hard discs, produced in Thailand, carried two Trojan horse viruses: autorun.inf and ghost.pif, the bureau under the Ministry of Justice said.
The tainted portable hard disc uploads any information saved on the computer automatically and without the owner’s knowledge to www.nice8.org and www.we168.org … [and] sensitive information may have already been intercepted by Beijing through the two Web sites, the bureau said.
While smoke is generally a good indication that fire is present, the inadvertent placement of malcode on electronics is not an unheard of occurrence.
