[text deleted] I have to admit, Western Digital pulled a slick one with smartware, real slick. Not only is their rootkit portable, but its virtual, literally at the hypervisor level.
It didn’t take me but a few seconds after plugging it into my computer to realize that smartware is a rootkit. It may or may not have acted on any rootkit-like intentions, but every aspect of smartware is characteristic of a rootkit. From the inability to remove it, to western digitals lack of support to provide tools for removal - other than a slick method of hiding it, down to the falsification of available hard drive space, and the amount of space smartware really occupies // eg: with the full 465gb ntfs partition available as “free space” (eg: 500gb drive) as reported in the HD properties (as it is supposed to be with any 500gb drive formatted to ntfs), somehow 104mb is miraculously being reported as used, yet unaccounted for. However, this is false also, because smartware is really occupying 293mb ( verification of size on properties/copy ) and 465gb is still free - yea right~
