From my research it's actually a virus which is capable of writing vendor specific ATA commands to be able to write code into the hard drive's service area (hidden area where the drive's firmware is) to be able to embed itself there and later write code which gives the group (suspected to be the NSA) access to the computer.

The data wasn't put there by WD or any other hard drive manufacturer, and they may not have helped or participated in any way. Anyone with basic data recovery equipment like PC-3000 can read/write the firmware code from drives and possibly figure out how to compromise them.

Don't be so quick to blame the people who made the HDD for the issue. It's just a vulnerability that no one ever planned on because it seemed like an impossible amount of work to go through to build a virus capable of this.

I do find it interesting that this all came out not long after Seagate started encrypting access to it's hard drive's service area. I'm wondering if they knew something about it, and thus the changes found in the newer DM drives that no one can work on.... either way they'll likely be soon advertising it as the drive that the NSA can't hack.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

what if they are infecting it THEN encrypting it so no one can figure out it is infected?

bear solace in the general idea that these types of malware are reserved for quite special targets.
if you have a new HD, I think you'll be fine. unless of course you are a world leader in some very interesting to the guys sending out the malware.

I am pretty sure if you had anything remotely interesting to those guys, you wouldn't be posting on here to start with.

I doubt they would be interested in our Linux ISO's or stuff from the Swedish marketplace.

as far as information they might use from our knowledge, well their malware is 100 times more advanced than I know how to do, so I think that's not worth worrying about either.