Are Key Loggers Being Built into New Laptops?
(From WinXP News.com)
Several Web sites and blogs have recently discussed a mysterious heatshrink-wrapped device that people are finding inside their new notebook computers from Dell, HP and Gateway. Some have claimed that these appear to be hardware key loggers - devices that capture and save everything you type into your computer using the keyboard. We haven't run across anything like this in our (Sony and Toshiba) notebook computers.
The pictures of the mystery device shown at
http://c0x2.de/lol/lol.html do indeed look like the internal key logger photo shown on the Anti-Spy Shot Web site at
http://www.anti-keylogger.com/keylogging_hardware.html but the letter purporting to be from the Department of Homeland Security doesn't exactly ring true. And normally, you have to remove a hardware key logger in order to retrieve the data it's recorded, so DHS would have to actually seize your computer for it to be any good to them. So we don't buy the idea that this is some government conspiracy, and neither does Snopes.
If key loggers are being built into new computers (and that's a big "if"), it's more likely the device is intended to function like the "black boxes" in cars, perhaps to be used to collect information for troubleshooting if the computer is returned to the vendor for repairs. So far, we've heard of no responses from the hardware vendors about this. If you've recently purchased a new portable computer from a major vendor, you might want to open up the case and see what's in there, just for curiosity's sake.
Topic: key loggers being built into new laptops? (Read 1260 times)