Seagate Technology LLC has shipped Maxtor disk drives containing Trojan horses that upload all data on the disks to a pair of Chinese Web sites, the Taiwanese government's security service warned this weekend.The Investigation Bureau, part of the Taiwan Ministry of Justice and responsible for both internal security and monitoring foreign threats, said it suspected mainland China's authorities were responsible for planting the malware on the drives at the factory.

According to reports in the English-language Taipei Times, about 1,800 Seagate-made drives left a Thailand facility with a pair of Trojan horses preinstalled. The Investigation Bureau said that the two Trojan horses "phone home" to a pair of Web sites hosted in Beijing and report all data recorded on a compromised drive. Internet records show that both sites -- www.nice8.org and www.we168.org -- were registered with XinNet.cn, one of China's largest domain registrars. Much of the registration information, however, including the contact name and mailing address, appears bogus.

The Investigation Bureau identified the infected drives as Maxtor Basics 500GB models and demanded that the Taiwanese distributor pull all units from shelves. Of the 1,800 drives reportedly equipped with malware, 1,500 have been removed from the sales channel. The remainder had already been sold.

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