hardware keyloggers in laptops

[davidnix71]

Do you think I should be concerned? If they are this small and inexpensive, what other machines are they in and who is watching? Can they be disabled without breaking the laptop?

http://virus.org.ua/unix/keylog/klog.htm

[piratePenguin]

I heard that was bullshit - they're not really in any Dell laptops.

[WMD]

It's fake.  Some of the pictures are taken from the product's own website.

[davidnix71]

I hope it's fake. Hooked up to the ethernet controller like that, it wouldn't take long to upload the entire contents of a 4mb mem chip. I wonder how you would make the remote call. Does it have an embedded OS?

It sure would be hard to detect. Most laptop owners don't have the time or skills to open the case, or would want to, since it would void the warranty.

Dell has our company's supply contract. Our sys admins already know what everyone is doing, but having a keylogger sure would take it to a different level. Even on an encrypted web page, all your data would belong to whoever could read that chip.

That might be a security nightmare of a different sort. If there was a back door into this thing, anyone with it would be open whenever they went on the web. A least with Linux you don't have to worry about software backdoors like Windows.

[Orethrius]

That's been established as being fake for about a year now.  The images are lifted from this site, as is much of the text.  If you check the approximate location of the "blurred" text against the letter on this page, it appears to show the "blurred" text on the hoaxed page.  Having said that, I've had a number of the (often varying) systems splayed out in front of me, and found nothing on this order.  It's strictly a desktop keyboard kind of thing, and anyone with electronics experience would tell you the same - there's nothing there to suggest a direct network connection, other than the made-up claim that "it sits off the NIC" - a move that wouldn't work, as there's not anywhere NEAR enough memory on that chip to handle a direct live network connection on that order.

[pofnlice]

A hammer will fix it....