The Dunce of the Week award goes to.....
...the employee of Seagate who said that "Yes, the drive is formatted, but I have never heard of a virus that lives in the master boot record."
Ok, so the employee had never heard about a virus that infects the MBR, therefore Seagate didn't have a problem? Putting aside the fact that the infection had nothing to do with the MBR, if Seagate is going to let an employee comment about infected hard drives, then they should find somebody who knows what he is talking about.
In spite of the Seagate employee's inane (and incorrect) protestations, it turns out that roughly 1,800 portable Maxtor hard discs, produced in Thailand, carried two Trojan horse viruses: autorun.inf and ghost.pif, The Trojan was designed to upload any information saved on the computer automatically and without the owner's knowledge to nice8.org and we168.org.
Yay for quality control. This reminds me of the infected MP3 players distributed by McDonalds, and the infected iPods distributed by Apple...
If you have purchased a Maxtor external hard drive in Thailand since August you may wish to review these reports:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2007/11/12/2003387447
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2007/11/11/2003387202