[Cryptography] My ignorance and drive firmware hacking

[Robert L Wilson]

A couple of years ago I had a (Seagate, 1TB) disk drive in a PC "fail" 
and I could not tell what was wrong with it. I sent it to a company I 
had dealt with before who would attempt to recover data. (Some was 
backed up but not some other stuff I really cared about. Shame on me...) 
They did their job nicely, and their verdict on the drive was "firmware 
corruption". I had never before thought about the firmware being field 
rewritable. (I do remember the furor some years ago when PC motherboards 
first had field rewritable BIOS PROMs, and the risk of attack. Some had 
the nice feature that you could not write to the firmware without moving 
an on-board jumper: I fear that safety move has died out.)
So I wondered whether the firmware had simply changed due to some random 
glitch, we can always imagine a cosmic ray loosing a flash of electrons 
into a chip. I also wondered whether it was "malware" from some bad guy. 
Then I heard that many (I think thousands) of similar drives had failed 
in the same way. Now I have to wonder if it was somebody just learning 
to plant things in the firmware and not getting it quite right. Maybe I 
was better off losing the drive than having them succeed in planting 
something with more disastrous effects!
Bob Wilson