The United States National Security Agency (NSA) has had access to the hard drives of thousands of personal computers for at least 14 years without ever installing malware on them from the internet. Spyware infections within the firmware of brand new hard drives from brands including Seagate, Western, Digital, IBM, Toshiba, Samsung, and Maxtor may have given the NSA the ability to exercise full remote access control on infected machines.
None of the companies involved have admitted knowledge that their hard drives were infected with the malware. The spyware is installed in the firmware of the devices, which is already installed on hard drives when you buy them from the store. This is executable code that can't be easily removed by an end-user; even by doing a full data wipe on a disk.
