A sequence of errors led to Dell's delivery of motherboards with malware and the company is in the process of overhauling its testing process to resolve issues before dispatching hardware to customers, it said on Thursday.
Dell on Wednesday said that some replacement motherboards for PowerEdge servers may have contained the W32.Spybot worm in flash storage. The malware issue affected a limited number of replacement motherboards in four servers, the PowerEdge R310, PowerEdge R410, PowerEdge R510 and PowerEdge T410 models, the company said.
"There was a sequence of human errors that led to the issue, That being said, we have identified and implemented 16 additional process steps to make sure this doesn't happen again," said Dell spokesman Jim Hahn.
Hahn did not provide additional details on the steps being added to track and resolve such issues. But he said that all affected motherboards had been removed from the service supply chain. Current antivirus software with updated signatures would flag the malware's presence and users would have to be running an unpatched version of Windows 2008 or an earlier version of the OS.
A Dell quality management specialist wrote in an e-mail that the code was accidentally introduced during the manufacturing process of the server motherboards. The code was detected on the embedded server management firmware during internal testing by Dell.
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