Samsung laptops came with Keylogger

Mohamed Hassan, a graduate of the Master of Science in Information Assurance (MSIA) program at Norwich University, discovered an application called StarLogger had been installed on his brand new laptop.

Starlogger is a publicly available key logger that tracks keystrokes even in password boxes and can even take screenshots and sends this information to am e-mail account specified during the install.

He reported it and in a similar move to SonyBMG about the installing of rootkits, Samsung's support department denied the existence of any such software on its laptops., but after he got another model and it had the key logger on it to they said it was Microsoft's fault and they just make the hardware, after Mohamed told them that that didn't make sense he got pushed up the chain and the supervisor said he was "not sure how this software ended up in the new laptop," but confirmed that "yes, Samsung did knowingly put this software on the laptop to monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used."

The two models currently known to contain this software are the R525 and R540. CNET has published a helpful guide on how to remove this software, to read it click here.

Whether Samsung faces a similarly global problem or merely one misbehaving reseller still isn’t clear. A statement from a company spokesperson says that it’s looking into the situation: “Samsung takes Mr. Hassan’s claims very seriously. After learning of the original post this morning on NetworkWorld.com, we launched an internal investigation into this issue. We will provide further information as soon as it is available.”