A sequence of faults led to Dell's release of motherboards with malware and corporation is in the process of renovating its testing process to determine issues prior to dispatching hardware to customers, it said.

Dell said that a few substitute motherboards for PowerEdge servers might have contained the W32.Spybot worm in flash storage. The malware matter influence a limited number of substitution motherboards in four servers, the PowerEdge R310, PowerEdge R410, PowerEdge R510 and PowerEdge T410 models, the corporation said.

"There was a sequence of human faults that led to matter, That being said, we have recognized and execute 16 additional process steps to ensure this doesn't occur again," said Dell spokesman Jim Hahn.

Hahn did not offer extra particulars on steps being added to path and decide such matters. But he said that all influenced motherboards had been eliminated from service provide chain. Present antivirus software with updated signatures will flag malware's occurrence and users will have to be running an unpatched version of Windows 2008 or an previous version of the OS.

A Dell quality management expert wrote in an e-mail that code was by chance introduced in the manufacturing process of server motherboards. The code was identified on entrenched server management firmware in interior testing by Dell.