Samsung Keylogger Stories a False Alarm

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday March 31, 2011 @01:31AM from the everyone-sit-down-and-chill-out dept.

Trailrunner7 writes "The panic that arose yesterday about Samsung allegedly shipping laptops that contained a pre-installed keylogger turns out to have been a complete mistake after further investigation by security researchers and the company itself. In fact, the controversy was the result of a false positive from one commercial antimalware suite and nothing else. Several outlets reported on Wednesday that Samsung laptops had been found to contain a keylogger known as StarLogger right out of the box from the factory. However, upon closer inspection by security companies, the folder on the laptops that supposedly contained the malware was actually a directory that is part of Windows' multi-language support."

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Re:epic FAIL by cf18 · 2011-03-31 01:59 · Score: 5, Interesting

Indeed.
- an antivirus software that rise alarm base on a two letter directory name inside \Windows , even when it is empty.
- a "security researcher" that take the alarm at face value and never check if is actually there, check if the process run, what kind of content it was logging and where it is sending them.
- a low level support manager confirm the software's existence, probably thinking about the fan speed and temperature monitoring software.