Western Digital for the win!

I am so glad that I have been using Western Digital drives for quite some time.  Seagate used to be a good brand but lately they’ve been on the lagging edge of quality.  And here’s why I don’t use Seagate/Maxtor drives.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/21/0052236
“Two months after acknowledging that their flagship 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11s could hang while streaming video or during low-speed file transfers, Seagate again faces a swell of complaints about more drives failing just months after purchase. Again, The Tech Report pursued the matter until they received a response acknowledging the bricking issue. Seagate says they’ve isolated a ‘potential firmware issue.’ They say there’s ‘no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive;’ however, ‘the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on.’ If users don’t like the idea of an expensive data-laden paperweight, Seagate is offering a firmware upgrade to address the matter, as well as data recovery services if needed. By offering free data recovery, Seagate seems to be trying to head off what could become a PR nightmare that may affect several models under both the Seagate and Maxtor brands.”

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/17/0115207&tid=198
“The latest firmware updates to correct Seagate woes have created a new debacle. It seems from Seagate forums that there has yet to be a successful update of the 3500320AS models from SD15 to the new SD1A firmware. Add to that the updater updates the firmware of all drives of the same type at once, and you get a meltdown of RAID arrays, and people’s backups if they were on the same type of drive. Drives are still flashable though, and Seagate has pulled the update for validation. While it would have been nice of them to validate the firmware beforehand, there is still a little hope that not everyone will lose all of their data.”

While nobody is looking…

During the inauguration of the United States of America’s 44th President Barrack Obama, while no one is looking and the media is flooded with coverage of the event and every possible detail, the Washington Post decides to publish this article about a massive data breach where millions of credit card transactions may have been compromised.  Why post this during the inauguration?  Couldn’t they have posted this the day after so that other news agencies and media outlets could pickup the story and get the word out that the compromise of a credit card processing company had happened?

Well, the short version is Heartland Payment Systems was infected with a sniffer application on their network and had millions of transaction recorded.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/01/payment_processor_breach_may_b.html

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/20/1930252
“Brian Krebs over at the Washington Post just published a story that Heartland Payment Systems disclosed what may be the largest data breach in history. Today. During the inauguration. Heartland processes over 100 million transactions a month, mostly from small to medium-sized businesses, and doesn’t know how many cards were compromised. The breach was discovered after tracing fraud in the system back to Heartland, and involved malicious software snooping their internal network. I’ve written some additional analysis on this and similar breaches. It’s interesting that the biggest breaches now involve attacks installing malicious software to sniff data — including TJX, Hannaford, Cardsystems, and now Heartland Payment Systems.”