Dell Logging Your Keyboard....Came across this on Yahoo

[LibertyorDeath]

Dell Logging Your Keyboard....
by: super_hydrocodone_man (37/M) 06/18/05 11:13 am
Msg: 76 of 76
1 recommendation

http://news.messages.yahoo.com/bbs?action=m&board=37138446&tid=ucdahusbandwhowontstanduptomomgetswifesheaveho&sid=37138446&mid=76&um=50&.sig=qjx7QMmcwxJtbYOrzdBrzQ--

I was opening up my almost brand new Dell 600m laptop, to replace a broken PCMCIA slot riser on the motherboard. As soon as I got the keyboard off, I noticed a small cable running from the keyboard connection underneath a piece of metal protecting the motherboard.

I figured "No Big Deal", and continued with the dissasembly. But when I got the metal panels off, I saw a small white heatshink-wrapped package. Being ever-curious, I sliced the heatshrink open. I found a little circuit board inside.

Being an EE by trade, this piqued my curiosity considerably. On one side of the board, one Atmel AT45D041A four megabit Flash memory chip.

On the other side, one Microchip Technology PIC16F876 Programmable Interrupt Controller, along with a little Fairchild Semiconductor CD4066BCM quad bilateral switch.

Looking further, I saw that the other end of the cable was connected to the integrated ethernet board.

What could this mean? I called Dell tech support about it, and they said, and I quote, "The intregrated 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.

[Coexist]

1. I have a Dell, but I am not hardware-literate

how do I see if this is true about mine?

[LibertyorDeath]

6. You can call Dell tech support & ask them to confirm or deny it.

You can try running some anti key logger software & see if it detects anything but in this case I doubt it as it is a hardware based key logger .

The only sure way to know is to pop open the case but that may void the warranty.

[Deja Q]

2. And governments TRUST dell!

:D

[ThomWV]

3. And This Means?

For those of us that are clueless does this intrusion into your keyboard require something, or even mean something? It sounds so sinister while in fact you haven't really told is if this is a good, bad, or indifferent thing.

[AntiCoup2K4]

7. Michael Dell (CEO) is a close personal friend of the Chimp

Does that tell you what it means?

[Moochy]

4. The Dell keylogger conspiracy hoax

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000317047049/

[Deja Q]

5. The answer to this person's question is: Microsoft.

osted Jun 17, 2005, 1:45 AM ET by Rick

8 kilobytes of ROM to run a keystroke logger! Where did these guys learn to code?

[LibertyorDeath]

8. I hope this is true

The Dell keylogger conspiracy hoax

Posted Jun 16, 2005, 8:08 PM ET by Ryan Block
Related entries: Laptops

Dell keylogger hoax

Just in case you’ve seen that web page floating around implicating Dell in some wacked out government conspiracy by suggesting they fit a 4mb keylogger between the keyboard end of some guy’s 600m and the Ethernet adapter, we’d like to point out a few key bits, having been inside a Dell laptop or forty.

* Dell laptop keyboards plug directly into the motherboard with a ribbon cable
* He was inside to replace a broken PCMCIA slot riser on the motherboard? Uh, that’s a guaranteed next-day mobo replacement on a “almost brand new Dell 600m”—not that you could, but why bother even if you knew how and had spare laptop motherboard parts?
* We’ve never seen a zip-tied circuit board in professionally assembled machine
* That device is far too massive to fit under the mobo of a Dell laptop
* Awful blurry picture of where it’s at in the machine!

Sorry dude, but we’re calling major, major BS on this. Anyone care to prove us wrong and open up a huge can of civil rights violations?

[oscar111]

10. thread poster's: pls sum up post in plain english: hoax or no hoax?

some of the re's are in gibberish with no bottom line plain english at the bottom of the post for us liberal arts majors.

pls add such a summary

thanks

[oscar111]

11. wouldnt shrink wrap ovrheat chips?

and.. anyone else here find such a tiny board on their laptop?

[LibertyorDeath]

12. You decide I just reported what I came across on Yahoo

[oscar111]

13. Plain English referred to #5's style, HypnoToad, not OP

several are in technogibberish.

LIke no. five.

didnt mean the OP as much as some others.

tekkie talk is fine for most of a post, but add a bottom line ... hoax or no hoax.. for most of us here at DU.

thanks BTW, for the OP. Interesting.

[LibertyorDeath]

15. You mean this

"8 kilobytes of ROM to run a keystroke logger! Where did these guys learn to code?"

I think they are saying that 8 kilobytes of R ead O nly M emory is excessive for a keystroke logger & they must be crappy at writing code if they need that amount of ROM (memory) for it to function

[The Backlash Cometh]

9. Oh My God!

This could be the start of something BIG! Maybe even bigger than the recent MasterCard data theft.

[AndyTiedye]

14. If DELL Wanted to Do Something Like This To Their Whole Production Run...

...it would be built into the motherboard and connected with inside traces.
It could also be done in the installed software, but that isn't reliable
these days when so many of us install Linux on our machines.

If a kludge like that actually did show up in somebody's laptop,
it wasn't put there during manufacture.

In any case, such a device is only useful if it can communicate with
whoever put it there. If it opens a port and listens, that can be
detected by a port-scanner and blocked by a hardware firewall. You
can also monitor your own outgoing traffic (from another machine)
for anything you did not initiate.

Software key-loggers can be installed by viruses and are probably much more
of a threat than somebody installing extra hardware on your machine.
Key loggers of this kind are used by criminals for identity theft.
It has also been reported that the government has one, called "magic
lantern", that the major anti-virus companies agreed to not detect.

[LibertyorDeath]

16. Anti-keyloggers

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=anti+keylogger&btnG=Google+Search&meta=