Millions of Dell PCs Vulnerable to Flaw in Third-Party Component

[Eugene]

1. Not just Dell. This flaw may be in hundreds of millions of PCs.

Source: Forbes

Jun 22, 2019, 06:30pm

Warning Issued For Millions Of Microsoft Windows 10 Users

Gordon Kelly Senior Contributor
Consumer Tech
I write about technology's biggest companies

Windows 10 has enough problems to deal with right now. But Microsoft’s partners just made things a lot worse.

Picked up by Gizmodo, acclaimed Californian security company SafeBreach has revealed that software pre-installed on PCs has left “millions” of users exposed to hackers. Moreover, that estimate is conservative with the number realistically set to be hundreds of millions.

The flaw lies in PC-Doctor Toolbox, systems analysis software which is rebadged and pre-installed on PCs made by some of the world’s biggest computer retailers, including Dell, its Alienware gaming brand, Staples and Corsair. Dell alone shipped almost 60M PCs last year and the company states PC-Doctor Toolbox (which it rebrands as part of ‘SupportAssist’) was pre-installed on “most” of them.


What SafeBreach has discovered is a high-severity flaw which allows attackers to swap-out harmless DLL files loaded during Toolbox diagnostic scans with DLLs containing a malicious payload. The injection of this code impacts both Windows 10 business and home PCs and enables hackers to gain complete control of your computer.

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Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2019/06/22/microsoft-windows-10-problem-warning-dell-diagnostics-security-upgrade-windows/#147022a63f28