Reports have recently surfaced regarding a worrying discovery in some HP notebooks. Micheal Myng, also known as ZwClose, discovered a keylogger hidden inside HP’s Synaptics Touchpad driver whilst he was looking through the driver’s “strings.” This discovery is indeed worrying because the keylogger can be accessed by hackers to record every keystroke that a user makes.
Thankfully, HP has recently issued an emergency security patch to fix this issue. What makes this discovery even more shocking is the fact that the hidden keylogger is, according to HP, present in over 400 HP notebook models (including EliteBook, Spectre Pro, Envy, Pavilion, ZBook, ProBook, OMEN and many more). That said, the company did mention that the keylogger is disabled by default. The reasoning behind adding a keylogger inside affected HP notebooks in the first place was a measure to solve debug errors.
HP has further stated that neither the company or Synaptics had “any access to customer data as a result of the incident.” Regardless, you can head on over to HP’s official website to check whether your notebook is affected by this issue. The new security patch is also available there as well. In addition, the security patch is available through Windows Update as well.
(Source: ZwClose)
