Counterfeit Kingston Flash Drive Alert

[xenopeek]

Greetings!

I'm doing this as a public service and apologize if it is on the wrong thread, but since flash drives are important to many of us, I'm issuing this alert. A neighbor of mine who works at General Services Agency of the City of New York states there's an alert for all IT employees to check whether any Kingston flash drives purchased at Target and Walmarts are not counterfeit, easily detectable because they display no activity light. These are counterfeit China flash drives shipments with corrupted memories. It behooves you to do that simple test yourself and not wait for Target or Walmart to alert you! Yes, someone we know got "hit" with such gifts from Christmas, 8, 16 and 32 gig flash drives. You might want to contact Kingston for support because the stores might be cagey about admitting there's problem!

Jim in Queens

[srs5694]

I recently bought a 16 GB Kingston drive from NewEgg. It was this one, and it doesn't have an activity light. I haven't yet used it for much, so I can't comment on reliability. I figured they just got cheap on the light. Do you have a reference to additional sources about this?

[jimwg]

I recently bought a 16 GB Kingston drive from NewEgg. It was this one, and it doesn't have an activity light. I haven't yet used it for much, so I can't comment on reliability. I figured they just got cheap on the light. Do you have a reference to additional sources about this?

Can't give you the physical city alert but I learned Apple promptly deletes people posting same warning on their forum -- I suppose not to offend one of their major vendors, like Target. My neighbor's going right to Kingston to complain because the stores aren't going to own up to this. I backed this up myself by asking around Amazon and they cite that "China feits" are so cheap they don't even put LEDs in, I suppose figuring you must really be a sucker to miss the light and keep on purchasing them. These drives are a plague on eBay so never buy memory from them! We brought a set of Kingston flash drives just last summer and you could light a Xmas tree with them, so this must've been a recent bad batch that slipped through. Bad enough we have to worry about cyberwar and bugged circuits from China!

Jim in NYC

P.S.

This is rather old but gives you an idea of the scope of the problem. Unreal!
http://reviews.ebay.co.uk/HOW-TO-SPOT-FAKE-KINGSTON-FLASH-DRIVES?ugid=10000000011743045

[xenopeek]

Not specific to Kingston, but Wikipedia has a reference about the practice of faking a small storage USB stick as one with larger storage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_ ... e_products. The entire Internet seems to like to the Windows-only h2testw tool for detecting fake USB sticks like these. F3 is the LInux and Mac open-source alternative for it: http://oss.digirati.com.br/f3/.

[jimwg]

Not specific to Kingston, but Wikipedia has a reference about the practice of faking a small storage USB stick as one with larger storage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_ ... e_products. The entire Internet seems to like to the Windows-only h2testw tool for detecting fake USB sticks like these. F3 is the LInux and Mac open-source alternative for it: http://oss.digirati.com.br/f3/.

I'm with you! It's like a damned arms race! The "China-feiters" get more and more sophisticated in getting around fake detection! This is quite dated but look how genuine they can pass even then! http://reviews.ebay.co.uk/HOW-TO-SPOT-FAKE-KINGSTON-FLASH-DRIVES?ugid=10000000011743045 I'll be purchasing directly from manufacturers at this rate!

Jim in NYC