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Comment by GiraffeNecktie | Hacker News Reader

I would have expected this to show up from many different sources. The fact that only one person is reporting this makes the story somewhat suspect. Surely he's not the only Samsung owner to run a malware scan.

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> Surely he's not the only Samsung owner to run a malware scan.

On a machine he just bought, without installing anything else?

Besides, someone has to be first.

He noticed this back in February so I'd think that's a fairly long time to be the only report. A few other things bothered me about the article: the heavy handed reference to Sony's rootkit, as others noted, is inappropriate since the Sony rootkit was clearly a deliberate decision. In this case, the most we can say at this point in time is that he found a keylogger on a Samsung computer. Whether it was put there deliberately or not is unknown. Which leads to my further gripes with the headline (which flatly implies that it was deliberate), with the fact that he didn't retain the evidence but chose to write about it (which means noone can verify his findings), and with his apparent lack of curiousity about whether the keylogger was operational and where it might be sending its data.

On March 1, 2011, I called and logged incident 2101163379 with Samsung Support.
...

The supervisor confirmed that 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."

Ah. Missed that bit. Thanks.

Someone could verify it by buying a laptop and checking to see if the keylogger exists. Someone with more money to spend than me, anyway :P

It seems much more likely that the AV exe that he is running is infected.

He mentioned the models of Samsung laptops that he had access to. Perhaps someone on this HN thread could verify?

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