Chris Mosby at myITforum.com

Samsung laptops may have spyware pre-installed just for you!
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Published: 2011-03-31,
Last Updated: 2011-03-31 15:19:23 UTC
by Joel Esler (Version: 2)
6 comment(s)

Update: Or not. :( Yes, we have also seen the stories from F-Secure and GFI Sunbelt. This was apparently a false positive that wasn't thoroughly investigated before it hit the wires. In this case, simply because the directory existed, the "aggressive" signature was triggered. All of the standard security software that we use (A/V, IDS, etc.) is subject to false positives, but I guess the real question this poses for us as a community is how good a job are we doing in the follow up and confirming what our software is telling us.

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Looking at this article that I received from a reader this morning (thanks Bill!) over on MSNBC (A news agency which is a joint venture in between Microsoft and NBC), a security researcher claims that Samsung is installing the Keylogging software "StarLogger" into new Samsung laptops.

Samsung, according to the article blames Microsoft initially, only to back that out and claims it's installed to "monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used."

Naturally, if this is true, it's not a good thing.

So let's put a call out to our readers. Apparently this software puts itself in "C:WindowsSL". So if you have a Samsung laptop, let us know at the contact link if that directory exists. If it does, this is wrong, and we need to emphasize that this type of thing isn't acceptable to these manufacturers.

Remind anyone of the Sony "rootkit" from a couple years ago?