Tin Hat Bonus: Jetlag Got Me.

Update: Sorry guys. I hadn’t seen it before, but apparently this dell keylogger junk is a rather delicious hoax. To keep from confusing the RSS readers, I’m leaving a post stub up. If I wasn’t travel-beaten I would have paid attention to the fact that the supposed keylogger wasn’t on a flexible flat cable. I pulled the image since it was originally stolen.

It’s probably totally BS, but supposedly this guy found what seems to be a keylogger inside his new dell 600m laptop. He submitted a FOIA request to the DHS, only to have his request denied. It’s a bit tin-hat, but the idea that a three letter agency might be adding extra hardware to your laptop is very disturbing indeed. I guess it’s time to start auditing any new hardware purchased for bonus parts. [via]

16 thoughts on “Tin Hat Bonus: Jetlag Got Me.

  1. Old hoax which has long been debunked.

    The PS/2 cable should be a good giveaway Laptops use ribbon cable.

    Please issue a public apology so we know you are not using manufactured fear to increase ad hits/revenue, like Digg, Slashdot, and Make routinely do.

  2. OK, this one is a hoax. But why couldn’t it be real? I wouldn’t hook mine up to the Ethernet line, but it seems entirely plausible to me that you could build a keyboard sniffer with an integrated Bluetooth or WiFi interface for readout. Take a surface-point Atmel or PIC16F, a serial EEPROM, tiny BT module and you’re off. The 600m is easy enough to work inside, and very few people take their laptops apart enough to see something like that (and would probably mistake it for the modem or BT modules anyway – they look similar enough).

  3. Yes it could definitely be real, but this one, like squidhat and weirdguy said, is total and absolute hoax….

    I mean, you don’t need anyone to tell you, just do what I did: Look at the source code of the page :-)

    (Finally, all those months spent playing notpron are somewhat paying up :-P)

  4. did anyone ever think that the reason it’s been posted as “it’s a hoax” is that someone got contacted by a certain agency, I won’t claim to know which, and was told to say that this is just a hoax? It would be a most effective and cost free method for them to cover it up. Everyone on here gives the webmaster credibility, and it gives “them” plausible deniability about any sort of cover up. I’m not making acusations, but it all seems a bit fishy.

  5. if dell was going to do this, wouldn’t they keep it all on the motherboard to both keep inconspicuous and incase of keyboard replacement, continue loging? this is illogical, plus they would be in serious legal trouble. also to them a simple keylogger would be useless… embedding their own trojan in your preloaded windows would be much simpler for stealing your info.
    OH NOES!!!!!!!
    *paranoia paranoia everyone’s out to get me*

  6. I also don’t think that such a company like Dell would have put keyloggers into their computers, but it is better to have hardware anti-keylogger anyway like PrivacyKeyboard or any other.

Leave a Reply to timCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.