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Acer May Be Bugging Computers
tomjen writes "What if a well known laptop company had silently placed an ActiveX Control on their computers that allowed any webpage to execute any program? Well Acer apparently has and they have (based on the last modified-by date of the file) been doing this since 1998. 'Checking the interface of the control reveals it has a method named "Run()" as shown below. The method supports parameters "Drive", "FileName", and "CmdLine". Isn't it strange for a control that's marked "safe for scripting" to allow a method that is suggestive of possible abuse?'"
They're Ferrari's
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Mine shipped with Linux, which I immediately wiped & installed FreeBSD, but I appreciate the thought
I expect exploits for this to start appearing within days, if not hours...
Haha. I was just joking. I actually use mine by drilling through the case, and making and breaking a couple of connections between the motherboard and three "C" cells hooked in series with paperclips. Manually, beeyotch. Real men type in raw binary without the keyboard. But I appreciate the thought.
Could just be there for optional "built-in" bluetooth or Wifi. A USB module is probably cheaper than an Mini-PCI.
Plus, if they do no wireless, Wifi-only and Wifi+BT models, with a single Mini-PCI slot, they would need both Wifi and Wifi+BT cards, if they have a "hidden" USB port, they only need to stock Wifi mini-PCI cards and USB bluetooth adapters, the same adapters that are sold independently.
This comment is guaranteed*
*not guaranteed
1) Whenever possible, build your own.
2) When you can't build your own (laptops), *always* re-install your OS after purchasing a new computer, and for God's sake use a real install CD and not the recovery one provided by the manufacturer.
The original article failed to notice that it's a Lunch application. It's actually a throw back to when Acer briefly partnered up with 180solutions to deliver targeted pop-under sandwiches to hungry laptop owners. The idea being that after seventeen hours of trying to uninstall Bonsai Buddy the computer user would be debilitated through starvation and susceptible receptive to sp(iced h)am..
The program was abandoned when Acer's engineers failed to perfect the wasabi-over-ip protocol - leaving the whole system unreliable an prone to bagel overrun.
-Steve http://www.stevennicholson.com
This news is unbelievable.
Acer still makes computers? People still buy them?
I remember Acer being a budget brand with a bad rep for quality and customer service back in the mid- to late-90s. I can't believe they are still a going concern.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
To remove this from your machine.
Goto Start > Run and type:
regsvr32 -u lunchapp.ocx
(-u for uninstall)
Read the article: Theres a trivial piece of example "exploit" code running calc.exe.
But as you can run ANY windows binary with any command line (at least according to the article), actual exploitation is trivial.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Apparently, someone in Brazil noticed this last November
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
"Please give examples or something of how this could be used for ill purposes. Yes, I realize it is obvious to most people but I'm a beginner."
:)
:)
:)
:)
A beginner & an AC - wants to know exactly how to execute the 'bad thing', and promises not to inhale
Oh...rudimentary...well, that's different. Since Acer would presumably have the power to control any aspect of your computer when you use it to log onto any webpage, all they need to do is to wait for you to access a site under their control, and bingo, they can lift all of your installation logs, cookies, saved passwords, MS WORD docs containing the words 'budget; personal; finance; medical; records; debt; sex, SSN (and all applicable variants),etc.
OK, let's say you are gullible enough to think that they can take all of that they want, and still not put you at risk - now, think for just a moment about who 'they' are...? What are the odds of 'they' going to all that trouble and not having some plan to do something with what they glean that you will not be pleased with...? Still not impressed?
How's this... Acer sits around and waits for just the right time and boom - they toggle a flag on your computer that makes it appear that it needs to have XYZ repaired, and what do you know, the only resource is...ACER!!
A new age variation on the old water-bag trick. One guy owned two service stations. One station was the last stop before heading out of LA, into the desert, heading for Palm Springs. The other was the last service station before heading out of Palm Springs, out across the desert, heading for LA. When a car stops on the LA side, the station staff sell the unaware traveler a scary story about being in the desert and having the car break down from overheating. Seems, tho, if you buy a canvas water-bag filled with water, and hang it on your car's front grille, it will supposedly help cool the air before it flows across the radiator. Best insurance money can buy. Thank ya now, ya'll have a safe trip!
Problem is, that big 'ol canvas bag actually blocks the airflow, and by the time you get near the other side of the desert, your car overheats and you have to pay the Palm Springs service station to come and tow your car and fix everything that broke from overheating. Not a small fee, even in those days. They explain how the bag is what did the damage, and the hapless owner tells them to keep it.
What do you think the Palm Springs service station guys do with the demon water-bag? Well, of course, they sell it to the next dupe going from there to LA, and even help by attaching it to the grille of his car. Thank ya now, ya'll have a safe trip!
I figure that one bag most likely made dozens of round trips across the Mohave, and put at least two generations of kids thru law school
Rumor has it owning those two stations was the fastest way to retirement until the big casinos came in and the real pocket-picking took off.
I think a lot of computers have internal ports that were put in there as part of the original board design, but were never taken advantage of during configuration or subsequent system design.
In an old Mac of mine (G4 "Sawtooth"), there is an internal Firewire port right on the motherboard, even though there are virtually no (to my knowledge anyway) internal Firewire devices available. The most useful thing you can do with it is run it out to a dummy card-slot panel and give yourself an extra external port. (I suppose you could also run another HD by using a IDE to FW converter card, if you could find a small enough one.)
It's there, I suspect, because when they were designing that mobo, it wasn't clear that Firewire would be used primarily for DV and external peripherals, and wouldn't become the internal-peripheral interconnect of choice. For all the designers knew, Firewire could have become like SATA is today, with hard drives being built for it natively. In that case, having one inside the case could be useful as hell (particularly since that machine has space for 4 or 6 internal 3.5" HDs and 2 removable-media drives). They had no way of knowing that it would end up being the electronics version of an appendix.
I suspect if you were to look around closely at the first generations of a lot of technologies, you'd find a lot of things like this; design decisions made for possibilities that just didn't pan out, but were left there anyway.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
On all new computers, be PCs, Suns, RS/6000s, or anything, after getting the machine out of the box and plugged in, I tar (or ghost in the case of PC recovery partitions) off anything preinstalled to two backups, then format the hard disk (or disks/arrays) on the machine. After the disks are formatted, I then install the OS and drivers and get the machine to the latest patches that I can via CDs. Only after this and a lockdown check does the machine see the network.
I've just seen too many machines come pre-hosed from the factory. For anything that sees production use, I want to pack my own parachute and know exactly what is on the machine.
On PCs, I try to find drivers from the underlying OEM rather than depend on the PC vendor, as usually the PC vendor's drivers tend to be outdated, except for motherboard/system board/IO planar flash.
There was a local computer store in town that was selling them, and apparantly Acer shipped them to the store with Linux preinstalled. Some strange Chinese distro I'd never heard of... I'd reccomend the laptop, yeah... Served me well so far... warranty just expired and I've had no need to use it.
and no, I wasn't going for humour mods... my laptop actually shipped with Linux, and I did wipe it for FreeBSD (it runs OpenSolaris now, but that's beyond the point).
I recently bought a laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed from The Linux Store, which is in Ontario. I've been perfectly satisfied aside from the minor point that they only offer the choice of Ubuntu and Fedora Core when I would have preferred Debian.
You may be shocked to realize that Firefox plugins and extensions don't run in any sandbox at all. They in fact have access to any resource Firefox has, which on a Windows machine is usually administrator capabilities.
So what was the beef with ActiveX again?
Oh, and in Vista, IE7 runs in limited mode even on admin accounts, so ActiveX controls are limited too. Firefox so far doesn't take advantage of this.
It's easy to open wide a big mouth and flame Microsoft, but the thing is: how is the competition better?
I won't be surprised if all it's better about (in terms of security) is that it's less popular and thus less targeted by malware authors. We've seen some of this during the Firefox adoption boom, but I'm afraid IE7 might kill the further adoption of Firefox so I can prove it.
But do you know they haven't placed a rootkit on the preinstalled Linux?
Meh,
I immediately reformatted my newly-purchased Acer's hard disk, installed DR-DOS and Crosstalk and do all my computing on a VAX 11/750.
Next...
AT&ROFLMAO
I really have a hard time understanding your mindset. You refuse to believe in the seriousness of the vuln even when people give you an attack vector example. Please, why ?
Kinda changes the definition of a "pre-owned" machine!
BBH
Intel had to allow people to disable CPU ids.
Why is Microsoft allowed to "embed" an id string like the WGA identifiers that allow them to identify and traceback any individual who does an update of LEGALLY LICENSED SOFTWARE?!?!?
Why do I see a 3 year backlog of error/debug messages in certain WinXP system log files, and receive advice on how to disable error logging instead of someone FIXING THE PROBLEM?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Exactly, that's for extensions (and the browser itself) and is protected from execution by web pages. Exploits to either firefox or it's extensions or themes can lead to pwnage (same as any internet-capable program).
The difference between ie activex and fx extensions is that firefox encourages you to go through addons.mozilla.org, for which all the extensions are reviewed (though I don't know how thoroughly) and update automatically (eg if exploits are found).
I know that some, but certainly not all, "hidden" hardware/software is the result of a PHB "work-around", I submit the following anecdote about illogical engineering vs optimal solutions....
Many moons ago I worked on a large project where we supplied a logistics application along with 8000 laptops that we were also expected to maintain. The spec's for the laptop's were written into the $80M/5yr contract, in particular the contract specified "special" (ie: manafactured by our sister company) laptops with a 120M HDD. A thousand or so laptops were delivered immediately, I suspect this was mainly to garner a large initial payment, 800 were then stored in a warehouse by the customer for 2yrs while we wrote the software and ran a pilot with the other 200.
When it came time to ramp up to full production we found we could no longer get 120M HDD's but could get 250M for the same price (the HDD's were third party PCMCIA cards that were supposed to be "pre-imaged" by the hardware guys). The Dilbert moment happened when a PHB with way too much time on his hands had to sign the purchase order and demanded 120M HDD's because "that's what's it says in the contract". The solution was illogical but effective, we quietly arranged for our hardware friends to format the 250M physical drive into a 120M logical drive and ignore the remaning space (and told them why). A few PHB readable edits to the PO and hey presto a warehouse full of laptops with our software pre-installed on 120M drives and an extra PHB-invisible partion.
Now throwing away half the drive is clearlly illogical but in my mind it was the "optimal" solution, with the possible exception of a time consuming appendectomy that would gum up the workflow for weeks/months and could possibly result in a devil we didn't know taking over. I also say "optimal" because: The PHB belived he had asserted his authority over the project and a rival PHB in the sister company, all with just one demand. From what I recall he went off to pester someone else and gloat about it. Not only did it nueter the PHB but HR, the lawyers and the accountants were kept in their cages, the techies got a good laugh, and the customer remained oblivious to the whole fiasco.
Finally, a year or so into production when the image size started to bloat towards the 120M limit, the same PHB asked for a costing to retrofit bigger drives, like any good salesman we umm'ed and ahh'ed then went off to "see what we could do" before announcing we could remotely activate a new D: drive on a standard update cycle using some simple "magic" and a couple of mandays labour. The news delighted the PHB who promptly added a manday for his own "time". We didn't even hint that it was his previous demand had caused the current space squeeze, we simply saved our eveidence in case an appendectomy was required at some future random impasse. We also saved all the "can do" brownie points for the next time we had to convince the same PHB that his proposed solution to some imaginary problem really, truly, is a "can't do" situation, regardless of what PC week says.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Note: The following comments are legitimate information, designed to help people help themselves. I am not an Acer fanboy (I reserve that for SanDisk), but I like my laptop. YMMV.
Actually, I have an Acer Aspire 1640. It's a nice machine for the $799 I got it for about 6 months ago. And Acer doesn't load a bunch of AOL/WildTangent/EarthLink/etc useless "applications" that are bundled because they can't stand on their own, like certain other manufacturers *cough*Dell*cough*HP*cough*. The few things that were bundled (counted on *maybe* 2 hands) were actually useful.
Once I got to college (where I have access to $10 Win XP Pro discs) I wiped it, reinstalled Windows (gasp!) *and* Ubuntu Linux. Works great, and with 120GB HD, plenty of space for both OS's. The Windows works great, since it's very light (only Windows-only stuff, everything else is on Ubuntu+Wine).
Hardware support on Linux is pretty decent. After some elbow grease, wireless, ethernet, widescreen, CPU power stepping, Sansa m250, even hardware buttons are working. Sound is the only thing I'm not sure about, output works fine, input seems finicky. I could probably fix it, but I don't care that much yet.
So...I'm not that concerned. Besides, who uses Internet Explorer anyway?
(That was sarcasm. I know the correct answer is "98% of everyone, luser!")
(That was sarcasm too. I know the correct answer is really "No, it's 89%, n00b!!11!!BBQ!! Look at my fancy link!!")
(Other appropriate comments include "I for one welcome our new Acer-invited overlords", "In soviet russia, computers bug Acer!", "I use lynx, you insensitive clod", "Ubuntu sux. [Insert Distro Name Here] is sooo, like, better because [insert unsubtantiated claim here].", etc., ad infinitum.)
You all have Oo.o and Firefox, so get World Wind.
Old? Hah I rememember trolling by morse code back when slashdot was a ham radio channel.
And liked it!
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
I rememember trolling by morse code back when slashdot was a ham radio channel.
Youngsters these days. Back then it was called dashdot, it predated even radio, the oldest of us trolled with semaphores. With the introduction of electrickity, the whole telegraph scene took off. Then some guy named Morse forked the project and publicised the code as his own. It's been downhill ever since.
Hitches up his braces, fires some chaw in the spittoon, waits for someone older to out-troll
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on