Seagate 'Spins Up' a Raid on a Counterfeit Hard Drive Workshop (tomshardware.com) 47
An anonymous reader shared this report from Tom's Hardware:
According to German news outlet Heise, notable progress has been made regarding the counterfeit Seagate hard drive case. Just like something out of an action movie, security teams from Seagate's Singapore and Malaysian offices, in conjunction with local Malaysian authorities, conducted a raid on a warehouse in May that was engaged in cooking up counterfeit Seagate hard drives, situated outside Kuala Lumpur.
During the raid, authorities reportedly uncovered approximately 700 counterfeit Seagate hard drives, with SMART values that had been reset to facilitate their sale as new... However, Seagate-branded drives were not the only items involved, as authorities also discovered drives from Kioxia and Western Digital. Seagate suspects that the used hard drives originated from China during the Chia [cryptocurrency] boom. Following the cryptocurrency's downfall, numerous miners sold these used drives to workshops where many were illicitly repurposed to appear new. This bust may represent only the tip of the iceberg, as Heise estimates that at least one million of these Chia drives are circulating, although the exact number that have been recycled remains uncertain.
The clandestine workshop, likely one of many establishments in operation, reportedly employed six workers. Their responsibilities included resetting the hard drives' SMART values, cleaning, relabeling, and repackaging them for distribution and sale via local e-commerce platforms.
During the raid, authorities reportedly uncovered approximately 700 counterfeit Seagate hard drives, with SMART values that had been reset to facilitate their sale as new... However, Seagate-branded drives were not the only items involved, as authorities also discovered drives from Kioxia and Western Digital. Seagate suspects that the used hard drives originated from China during the Chia [cryptocurrency] boom. Following the cryptocurrency's downfall, numerous miners sold these used drives to workshops where many were illicitly repurposed to appear new. This bust may represent only the tip of the iceberg, as Heise estimates that at least one million of these Chia drives are circulating, although the exact number that have been recycled remains uncertain.
The clandestine workshop, likely one of many establishments in operation, reportedly employed six workers. Their responsibilities included resetting the hard drives' SMART values, cleaning, relabeling, and repackaging them for distribution and sale via local e-commerce platforms.
clever headline! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Chia is a "proof of space" cryptocurrency, which explains why it used so many HDDs (40 million terabytes at its peak).
Re: clever headline! (Score:2)
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There is: exabyte.
Yes, but that means nothing to most people.
Normal people measure HDD capacity in terabytes.
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Of course, such greedy behavior doesn't exist in our morally superior Western European culture.
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Re:clever headline! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Spins up" was a stretch but that it was a RAID is pretty funny
Re: clever headline! (Score:1)
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It's also interesting that there's enough margin in 'rolling back the odometer' on these drive to trick buyers that they're buying something new.
There is always enough margin in an activity which effectively used a device for "free" by cutting losses through fraud. The margin is literally infinite if you can get the original price.
Re: clever headline! (Score:1)
Counterfeit? (Score:5, Informative)
It sounds more like legitimate, but used, Seagate drives that are being hacked to present themselves as new drives.
Re:Counterfeit? (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds more like legitimate, but used, Seagate drives that are being hacked to present themselves as new drives.
Think of it as rolling back the odometer on a car. Originally it had 150,000 miles. Now the odometer shows 100,000.
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sure but that's not at all the same as counterfeit. a Honda with its odometer rolled back is still a Honda
Pedantic Amusement (Score:2)
Words get their meaning from use, not your fancy book Mr. Webster. 'The Internet is down' has always meant 'our local connection is down.' It never implied a global blackout! If I am not connected, then for me, the Internet is definitely not fine.
Re:Counterfeit? (Score:4, Informative)
Right, but you wouldn't call tha car a "counterfeit Ford"... you'd call it a Ford with a rolled-back odometer.
Re:Counterfeit? (Score:4, Informative)
Assuming that it was a Ford in the first place. When hacking the firmware you can make the drive say pretty much anything. The rest is just printing a sticker.
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Think of it as rolling back the odometer on a car. Originally it had 150,000 miles.
Yes, but that is Odometer fraud not a counterfeit vehicle.
In this case they are selling legitimate hard drives but fraudulently misrepresenting them as not used yet.
The only thing that is counterfeit is if they are making a warranty misrepresentation. I could see how this concerns seagate if the seller is misrepresenting the unit as covered by a manufacturer warranty, but otherwise it's just a simple seller fraud not so
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Imagine actually being able to build a 14TB hard drive but then having to label it as a Seagate!
Total nonsense - it's so incredibly difficult to pull this off there are only a handful of companies that have both the skills and capital to do it
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It sounds more like legitimate, but used, Seagate drives that are being hacked to present themselves as new drives.
I can read (and speak) German so the original Heise article was not a challenge. Some of the Seagate drives found there were rebranded as different models, does that count as "counterfeit"?
Heise started reporting this problem a while ago, possibly towards the end of last year. Their main computer magazine is called C't and is released every two weeks, recent editions have moved away from this story - rather than report "more of the same" - but before that new details were emerging all the time.
The only ot
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Has Amazon fixed the ASIN mess?
It used to be they just piled everything with the same stock number into the same bins, so even items sold directly by amazon could be supplied by counterfeiters.
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Or better, don't buy from Amazon. Since they single-bin all supplies of the same product number, even if it's "sold by Amazon" you can still get a fake sent in by a reseller.
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Basically every single computer part I have bought in forever has been purchased from a physical retailer. The chance that a physical product from a reputable retailer here in Australia is fake or dodgy is far less than the chance that something on Amazon is fake or dodgy.
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Here in the US, physical retailers have been disappearing. Fry's and Radio Shack closed entirely, Best Buy reconfigured into more of a cell phone store. Even the online space is regressing; Newegg has been subject to enshittification. Still, I haven't willingly subjected myself to Amazon products in 15 years. They were known for selling books at that time.
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"Best Buy reconfigured into more of a cell phone store." - That's exactly what happened to Radio Shack so the writing is on the wall for Best Buy. About the only online source I trust any longer is B&H and the only physical computer parts store chain I trust is Micro Center, although I have to drive 2 hours for the closest store. NewEgg was the shit until is was bought by the Chinese, now I wouldn't buy from them if you paid me. Amazon is an absolute clusterfuck, has been for over 10 years now, so nope
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I wish we had MicroCenter in Australia, every video I have seen that shows them makes them look way better than the options we have here.
Although I somehow doubt that MicroCenter comming to Australia would make any difference to just how crap the prices for computer parts are in this country...
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It's not just Australia, prices are crap here in the US too. Over the past 5 years I've had great success in purchasing used equipment for cheap and using those parts to build computer systems that are only a few years old. Video cards and CPUs a few generations back run just as well as new, in my opinion.
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Except that is false. Amazon has no shortage of supply chain fuckups even with devices supplied by Amazon themselves. Heck just last week there was a news item about someone who bought from Amazon (not fulfilled by) an RTX5090 only to receive a card with GPU chip and RAM missing.
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And this is why you should only buy HDDs, SSDs, and thumbdrives from Amazon themselves
No, you shouldn't. I tried buying a Seagate drive from "Amazon themselves" last year. The first was used and the warranty was expired. So I exchanged it. The next one was the same, and additionally had a counterfeit label on the drive. It was actually a convincing fake label but the QR code went to a bogus website that looked like the Seagate website and the label was missing the Seagate website address. The third was also used with an expired warranty and the counterfeit lable on that one didn't have the
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And this is why you should only buy HDDs, SSDs, and thumbdrives from Amazon themselves (not "fulfilled by Amazon", not third-party sellers on Amazon) or some other reputable retailer. Even if you don't get an outright scam with a much smaller actual capacity than advertised capacity, you may be getting a used product sold as new.
I've been following this story since it first broke and Heise were also reporting where people had bought their affected drives, the sources included authorised Seagate dealers. They did of course tell their readers how to recognise these drives, although I can't remember if they wrote the necessary software themselves or simply stated what it was called and where it was to be found.
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Is the workshop RAID 1? (Score:3)
If so then the counterfeiting will continue
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No, the workshop wasn't mirrored. Instead the warehouse had a Stripe down the middle with two separate workflows, each doing half the work. Raid 0.
Headline overkill (Score:2)
May I ask if they had a hard drive to get to the workshop to crash in? And if they were caught, the counterfeiters weren't that smart ...
But... (Score:2)
But did the counterfeit drives last longer than the genuine ones?