Hard Drive Firmware Hacking | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Several of Seagate's 3rd generation Wireless Hard drives have a secret backdoor for hackers that puts users' data at risk. A Recent study done by the security researchers at Tangible Security firm disclosed an " undocumented Telnet services " with a hard-coded password in Seagate Wireless Hard Drives. The secret Telnet Vulnerability ( CVE-2015-2874 ) with an inbuilt user account (default username and password — "root") allows an attacker to access the device remotely, left users data vulnerable to theft. According to US-CERT (Computer Emergency and Response Team) public advisory, multiple models of Seagate hard drives contain multiple vulnerabilities. Affected devices are: Seagate Wireless Plus Mobile Storage Seagate Wireless Mobile Storage (Wirelessly streaming your tablet and smartphone's data) LaCie FUEL (Wirelessly extending storage for iPads) The violation that an attacker can activate is, they can gain root access to the device and ac...

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) may be hiding highly-sophisticated hacking payloads in the firmware of consumer hard drives over the last 15 to 20 years in a campaign, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on thousands of targets' computers, according to an analysis by Kaspersky labs and subsequent reports. 'EQUATION GROUP' BEHIND THE MALWARE The team of malicious actors is dubbed the the " Equation Group " by researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, and describes them as " probably one of the most sophisticated cyber attack groups in the world," and "the most advanced threat actor we have seen. " The security researchers have documented 500 infections by Equation Group and believes that the actual number of victims likely reaches into the tens of thousands because of a self-destruct mechanism built into the malware. TOP MANUFACTURERS' HARD DRIVES ARE INFECTED Russian security experts reportedly uncovered sta...