- Seagate Exos and IronWolf Professional HDDs are prime targets for scammers
- Scammers alter QR codes and even drive serial numbers
- Toshiba and Western Digital aren’t as focused as Seagate — why?
The controversy of fraudsters modifying used Seagate onerous drives to seem unused regardless of having been powered on for hundreds of hours rages on.
Exos HDDs had been initially focused, however new proof from Heise (by way of ComputerBase — each initially in German) suggests IronWolf and IronWolf Professional NAS drives with capacities between 8 TB and 16 TB are actually additionally being drawn into the rip-off.
Preowned items of the quickest onerous drives can seem new if key knowledge resembling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Evaluation, and Reporting Expertise) parameters are tampered with.
How scammers manipulate onerous drive knowledge
A few of these drives have been discovered to have logged over 27,000 working hours. Nonetheless, customers can confirm a drive’s true situation utilizing instruments like smartmontools to retrieve hidden operational knowledge.
Scammers additionally alter product labels and QR codes to bypass Seagate’s guarantee verification system. As a substitute of directing customers to a web page displaying correct product particulars, these modified QR codes redirect to Seagate’s guarantee test however don’t present the serial quantity or storage capability.
One other technique used is serial quantity manipulation, whereby fraudsters take serial numbers from newer drives and fasten them to previous items, tricking Seagate’s system into displaying an prolonged guarantee interval.
Nonetheless, this method usually calculates precisely 5 years of guarantee from their supposed manufacturing date, which is a possible purple flag that nervous clients can examine.
Specialists recommend that potential patrons can test sure logs – resembling Self Check Logs or SATA Phy Occasion Counters – to find out if a drive has been beforehand used.
Seagate has acknowledged the difficulty, confirming that fraudulent practices are affecting IronWolf and Exos HDDs. The corporate is presently investigating the matter to deal with these considerations.
Within the meantime, patrons are suggested to be cautious when buying Seagate onerous drives from unofficial sellers and to confirm product particulars utilizing a number of sources earlier than making a purchase order.
Up to now, there have been no confirmed studies of comparable scams involving Toshiba or Western Digital (WD) onerous drives. This raises the query: why is Seagate the first goal?
One potential motive is that Seagate’s verification system depends on knowledge that fraudsters discover simpler to govern; not like Seagate, WD and Toshiba don’t use the identical FARM worth system.