- Seagate Exos and IronWolf Professional HDDs are high objectives for scammers
- Scammers regulate QR codes or even force serial numbers
- Toshiba and Western Virtual aren’t as focused as Seagate — why?
The debate of fraudsters editing used Seagate exhausting drives to seem unused regardless of having been powered on for hundreds of hours rages on.
Exos HDDs had been to start with focused, however new proof from Heise (by way of ComputerBase — each at first in German) suggests IronWolf and IronWolf Professional NAS drives with capacities between 8 TB and 16 TB at the moment are additionally being drawn into the rip-off.
Preowned gadgets of the quickest exhausting drives can seem new if key information equivalent to SMART (Self-Tracking, Research, and Reporting Generation) parameters are tampered with.
How scammers manipulate exhausting force information
A few of these drives were discovered to have logged over 27,000 running hours. Then again, customers can check a force’s true situation the use of equipment like smartmontools to retrieve hidden operational information.
Scammers additionally regulate product labels and QR codes to circumvent Seagate’s guaranty verification device. As a substitute of directing customers to a web page showing correct product main points, those changed QR codes redirect to Seagate’s guaranty test however don’t give you the serial quantity or garage capability.
Any other approach used is serial quantity manipulation, in which fraudsters take serial numbers from more moderen drives and fix them to outdated gadgets, tricking Seagate’s device into showing a longer guaranty length.
Then again, the program ceaselessly calculates precisely 5 years of guaranty from their intended manufacturing date, which is a possible pink flag that nervous consumers can examine.
Mavens counsel that doable consumers can test sure logs – equivalent to Self Check Logs or SATA Phy Tournament Counters – to decide if a force has been prior to now used.
Seagate has said the problem, confirming that fraudulent practices are affecting IronWolf and Exos HDDs. The corporate is these days investigating the topic to deal with those issues.
Within the period in-between, consumers are urged to be wary when buying Seagate exhausting drives from unofficial dealers and to ensure product main points the use of more than one assets prior to making a purchase order.
To this point, there were no showed stories of identical scams involving Toshiba or Western Virtual (WD) exhausting drives. This raises the query: why is Seagate the main goal?
One conceivable reason why is that Seagate’s verification device depends upon information that fraudsters in finding more uncomplicated to control; in contrast to Seagate, WD and Toshiba don’t use the similar FARM worth device.
