UPDATE – 3/31/2011
Just one day after this story spread across the internet, it has been found to be erroneous. A false positive by Vipre Antivirus software caused the issue. Vipre has accepted responsibility for the error.
A user discovered a keylogger pre-installed on two brand-new Samsung laptops that the company admitted was there to “monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used.” Mohamed Hassan wrote in Mich Kabay’s Security Strategies newsletter that as soon as he received his Samsung R525 laptop, he ran a full system scan and found a commercial keylogger called StarLogger. StarLogger claims it records every keystroke made on the computer, even on password-protected boxes, starting up whenever the computer starts up. The software emails results at intervals to a specified email address and will even include screen captures. Hassan ended up buying a second Samsung laptop, a model R540, and found the same keylogger installed on that one. “The fact that on both models the same files were found in the same location supported the suspicion that the hardware manufacturer, Samsung, must know about this software on its brand-new laptops,” he writes.
– and in another post …
The supervisor who spoke with me was not sure how this software ended up in the new laptop thus put me on hold. He confirmed that yes, Samsung did knowingly put this software on the laptop to, as he put it, “monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used.” In other words, Samsung wanted to gather usage data without obtaining consent from laptop owners.
DUMMR.com 