Talk:Absolute Home & Office

Disputed-section: Kaspersky Lab claims

The disputed section is one-sided and does not present Absolute Software's detailed response to the Kaspersky Lab report, which disproved much of what Kaspersky Lab had alleged: http://www.absolute.com/en/about/pressroom/research/kaspersky

Because of a conflict of interest, I can't make changes to this section myself, but would very much appreciate someone taking a look. Moorhou (talk) 16:44, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi. Which part of text in article is disputed? There is text from intro section: `a5b (talk) 03:57, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Analysis of Absolute CompuTrace by Kaspersky Lab shows that 
the persistence module is preinstalled into many BIOS images by most of laptop vendors 

and can be activated without user authorization. 

This can be rewritten according to Kaspersky: to something like "was found to be pre-activated on several laptops" `a5b (talk) 03:57, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

The software behaves like rootkit (bootkit), reinstalling some programs into Windows OS at boot 
and downloading modules from Command server via Internet. 

The rootkit is vulnerable to some local attacks

This can be rewritten to "first-stage loader of the rootkit is vulnerable". `a5b (talk) 03:57, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the time to look into this. The disputed text in the article is this whole paragraph below. Moorhou (talk) 20:17, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Analysis of Absolute CompuTrace by Kaspersky Lab shows that the persistence module is preinstalled into many BIOS images by most of laptop vendors and in rare cases was   
preactivated without user authorization. The software behaves like rootkit (bootkit), reinstalling some programs into Windows OS at boot and downloading modules from Command server  
via Internet. Rootkit installer is vulnerable to some local attacks[8][9] and to attacks from hackers, controlling all network communications of victim.[10]

Unfortunately the suggested rewrites include quotes and assertions from Kaspersky that were refuted by Absolute to be factually incorrect. So the rootkit was not actually proven "to be vulnerable to some local attacks" and no substantial evidence was found (according to Absolute's report, linked in my first comment) to show that any laptops were "found to be pre-activated" without prior knowledge of the users. At the very least, would it be possible to move all these points out of the intro section and into the "Vulnerabilities" section and change the wording so that Kaspersky's claims are shown as claims and not proven facts. Moorhou (talk) 20:17, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Is it true that Absolute CompuTrace and its module is preinstalled into many BIOS images? There is no way to disable or to delete this module from the BIOS (I hav it in my laptop and there is no BIOS option to turn it off; and no BIOS update with computrace deletion).

Then there is a claim from Kaspersky Lab - about "rare cases was preactivated without user authorization". They demonstrated this. Should this demonstraion be censored from Wiki?

When agent is not "fully installed", there is "small agent" ("Rootkit installer") which IS vulnerable, and it does not use encryption & authentication. I think this claim is correct and not contested by Absolute ("once the installation is complete, the communication is secure and uses encryption as well as authentication of the host server to reject attacks as described in the Kaspersky report").

Hackers may use own copy of "small agent" (because it is whitelisted by most antivirus vendors) to download and install any trojan software (settings of the small agent are not signed). Absolute says "source of the binary is from firmware." but anyone can take this small agent as single file; modify its settings; copy it to some USB flash or in any other way transfer it to some Windows machine (even without computrace agent in BIOS) and use it as trojan downloader / remote control agent..

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