UPDATE 8/16: DELL DOES NOT PUT KEYLOGGERS IN ITS LAPTOPS. THE WEBSITE THIS POST LINKS TO IS A WELL-DEBUNKED HOAX.

We won’t pretend to be technosavvy enough to know if this is a valid interpretation of looking at a Dell laptop’s still steaming bowels, but it bodes ill: according to this page, the Dell 600m laptop has a keylogger built into the hardware.

What could this mean? I called Dell tech support about it, and they said, and I quote, “The integrated service tag identifier is there for assisting customers in the event of lost or misplaced personal information.” He then hung up.

A little more research, and I found that that board spliced in between the keyboard and the ethernet chip is little more than a Keyghost hardware keylogger.

The reasons Dell would put this in their laptops can only be left up to your imagination. It would be very impractical to hand-analyze the logs, and very CPU-intensive to do so on a computer for every person that purchased a dell laptop.

The author was referred to Homeland Security: they claimed the records were exempt from being disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act. Doubtlessly under their ‘Constitutionally Inconvenient’ provision. Hey, terrorists! Oh, and everyone else! You might want to stop plotting your insurgencies on Dells.

Edit: D’oh! This is much ado about nothing. Snopes debunks. Thanks, James!

Keylogger Built Into Dell 600m [Virus.org.ua] (Thanks, Mary!)

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