malicious firmware

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Would like to know if there are any programs available to check if I have one of these infected hard drives, or for that matter and device or motherboard.

As I had a complete folder deleted from three separate backup drives. It contained "You guessed it " all the information I could find on different Conspiracy theory's. Such as police shooting unarmed citizens, Obama's Birth Certificates and UFO,s you get the picture.

Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based cyber security firm whose report into international hacking was previewed by the New York Times Yesterday, has exposed that the NSA has had the capacity to snoop on most U.S.-made computers since 2001.

The report claims that the NSA attained access to “firmware” code from all the major Western computer manufacturers – which runs every time a computer is switched on – and figured out how to lodge malicious software in the code.

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lol... I read the same story on dailymail today and promptly download kasperskys virus removal tool which found nothing.  Not to say it would be able to detect the hard drive code you're referring to but if they found the malware and havent incorporated it into their own tools then I doubt anyone else has either.  My scan came up clean but maybe Im just not being watched... yet... which I doubt.

[Pondus]

    As I had a complete folder deleted from three separate backup drives. It contained "You guessed it " all the information I could find on different Conspiracy theory's. Such as police shooting unarmed citizens, Obama's Birth Certificates and UFO,s you get the picture.

i think NSA have better things to do   

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NSA might but like every other company the NSA is filled with individuals who are surfing facebook, cracking into your computer to look at ur nude selfies and deleting folders they deem a threat to national security cause they have no reading comprehension skills on what the latest internal memo was telling them to look for and how to deal with it.  There was just a news story about three months ago I think where NSA people were using the data to blackmail an ex spouse or something (I dont recall the exact details but it was something along those lines).

People are people, people will continue to do malicious things for their own amusement and personal gain, and corporations are full of people.  This is the exact thing that privacy restrictions are meant to protect against.  So anyone that parrots and says if you havent dont anything wrong then you have nothing to hide is an idiot and a victim waiting to happen.

[Eddy]

It is real easy.
Download the official firmware from the manufacturers website and compare it with the firmware you have installed in a device.
It is ofcourse not a 100% guaranty, but it at least gives a strong indication.

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It is real easy.

I dont know about that...

Where exactly would you get the firmware code for firmware that came preinstalled when you bought a computer?  Its already installed... you didnt download an installation file and have that to compare with another file you're downloading... you're talking about looking at machine level code which rules out most people using computers being able to do.