A Trojan horse has allegedly been found on hard disks produced by Seagate, which sends a copy of everything saved to rogue websites.

The drives are produced in Thailand by Seagate, but are branded as Maxtor Basics 500GB portable drives. Two files are present on the pre-formatted drives, which are causing the problem: autorun.inf and ghost.pif.

It’s believed these files were added to the drives by Chinese subcontractors during the manufacturing process, leading to unsubstantiated speculation the data could be being fed back to the Chinese authorities. Around 1,800 discs could be affected, according to the Taipei Times.

Earlier this year Kaspersky claimed to have found another virus on Maxtor’s 3200 Personal Storage drives.

Seagate was unavailable for comment at the time of writing.