big brothers IS watching us

It was working. Some guy found a keylogger in his Dell laptop. This is one report, and I don't know the validity of the guy who wrote it, especially since it looks to be someone's personal site. They do exist, but I don't know how widespread this stuff is or if this guy has something against Dell. If it is widespread, dude, I am NOT getting a Dell.
 
Exfoliate said:
Hmm, still nothing, what was it like?
Click to expand...

This:

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.

The reasons Dell would put this in thier laptops can only be left up to your imagination. It would be very impractical to hand-anylze the logs, and very CPU-intensive to do so on a computer for every person that purchased a dell laptop. Why are these keyloggers here? I recently almost found out.

I called the police, as having a keylogger unknown to me in my laptop is a serious offense. They told me to call the Department of Homeland Security. At this point, I am in disbelief. Why would the DHS have a keylogger in my laptop? It was surreal.

So I called them, and they told me to submit a Freedom of Information Act request. This is what I got back:
Click to expand...

There are four pics of small circuit boards where the larger gaps are but theyre fairly irrelevant so I haven't uploaded those. The really important one is the letter from the Department of Homeland Security which I have (hopefully) attached.
 

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Well, whenever I come across a conspiracy theory I am instantly skeptical. The first thing I noticed was the description of the circuit board. While the chips mentioned are probably fully real, the detail of description makes it sound to me like an attempt to confuse.
Then I looked at the attached letter. This is the clencher, look at the letterhead. Pay close attention to the symbol. First of all the symbol has no visible writing on it. I also didn't think it looked like a government symbol. To verify this I simply went to the Department of Homeland Security website. Look in the upper right hand corner of the page. Do you see a resemblance to the symbol on the letter? I don't...
Furthermore, to finalize it completely, look at the "letter" again. Under "Department of Homeland Security" on the letter head "United States Secret Service" is written. The Secret Service (I just realized the initials of the Secret Service is SS, that's a little scary...) is in NO WAY affiliated with Freedom of Information online. The Secret Service, or as I will refer to them from now on, the SS :P has 2 and only 2 jobs. The obvious one being protecting high level political figures, i.e. the President, and the lesser known one being combatting counterfeit money. A letter concerning computer information freedom would have come from Andy Purdy, the IAIP National Cyber Security Director, assuming it came from a high level politician (I call BS on that one).
So here is my conclusion, it's as likely for this to be true as ice cream in Hell, as Jamie Hyneman says, this myth is busted. Any way you want to put it, in my mind at least, there is absolutely no way this is true. So rest easy, big brother may be watching but not by keyloggers in laptops.
 
Wow, nice post Max! Way to milk the thread for all it's worth dude, you definately took this one to town.
 
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