Keylogger Discovered Installed On New HP Laptops

If you own a new HP laptop or Elitebook, ProBook, or ZBook flavors you may have a keylogger installed on your machine that was there when HP sold it to you. The warning of the keylogger came Thursday from a research institute called ModZero reports CNET.

According to ModZero the audio driver installed on these machines has a keylogger that is recording every keystroke you enter into the computer and storing that information in an unencrypted file on the hard drive of the computer. The drivers doing these sneaky things on the new machines is from Conextant and is loaded on over two dozen different HP laptops.

ModZero says the information the keylogger could be recording when you use your HP laptop includes just about everything you type from passwords and websites visited to chat messages. Anyone with access to the computer that uses the driver would have access to that information without needing any authorization to use the information.

The Conextant driver has an executable file for controlling audio hardware inside the laptop when the user presses special keys. The debugging feature of that software sends all keystrokes through the debugging device and then stores that data away inside a log file in a public directory. ModZero says that this log file is overwritten each time the machine is booted up and the file has been on the laptops HP makes since at least Christmas of 2015.