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Who is "Absolute Persistence", and why is their spyware on 600M computers?
- phkamp 2y agoI have never seen a single article anywhere mention this company or their factory installed spyware. Why ?
- bigfatkitten 2y agoBecause it used to be called CompuTrace, which has been around for decades and written about at length. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18749010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18749010
- dboreham 2y agoBut not discussed here, it appears.
- walterbell 2y agoMentioned in comments, https://hn.algolia.com/?query=computrace&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=computrace&type=comment
- JSDevOps 2y agoNever heard of it
- toss1 2y ago>>Never heard of it Neither had I. It sounds like a major part of their plan, to just behave as a silent process that can always be re-booted through whatever changes the device goes through. Best to keep that sort of thing obscure.
- bigfatkitten 2y agoObscure how? It's been around for decades, the option to enable/disable it is in the BIOS setup on every machine that has it, and computer manufacturer's documentation tells you exactly what it is, because it's a selling point.
- fmajid 2y agoYou may have heard of under the LoJack name, basically an anti-theft measure for laptops.
- walterbell 2y agoCompuTrace has been shipped by every major x86 PC OEM for decades, for Windows process injection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_Home_%26_Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_Home_%26_Office > Absolute Home & Office (originally known as CompuTrace, and LoJack for Laptops) is a proprietary laptop theft recovery software (laptop tracking software). The persistent security features are built into the firmware of devices. Absolute Home & Office has services of an investigations and recovery team who partners with law enforcement agencies to return laptops to their owners. Absolute Software licensed the name LoJack from the vehicle recovery service LoJack in 2005. There used to be a BIOS option for on/off and "Permanently Disable", but that might have changed in recent versions. HP: https://support.hpwolf.com/s/article/Absolute-Software-Activation-Assessment https://support.hpwolf.com/s/article/Absolute-Software-Activ... Dell: yikes, the 2024 version is a permanent one-way, one-time option for Activate or Disable? Need to check status on eBay device purchases. https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/inspiron/how-to-deactivate-the-computrace-module/65a7ae5add46c478522100dc https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/inspiron/how... Lenovo: that one time we accidentally enabled it, https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/ht105220-unintended-computrace-activation https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/ht105220-unintend... Apple x86 laptops: shipped an Arm microcontroller (T2 Security Enclave) to assert control of interactions between x86 CPU and disk storage, until they could replace the CPU with Apple Silicon. HN ranking history for this thread: https://hnrankings.info/42277714/ https://hnrankings.info/42277714/
- unsnap_biceps 2y agoAre you saying Apple x86 shipped with this? Or are you saying the T2 is equivalent?
- walterbell 2y agoT2 is exclusively under Apple control, without dependency on a third party (e.g. Intel, Management Engine, Absolute). The functionality of different T2 generations has been documented by Apple and security researchers. T2 included Activation Lock / Anti-Theft features.
- Animats 2y agoSo who's exploiting this now? Exploits were known back in 2014. Could a manufacturer placing this on a PC be considered material support of terrorism?
- bigfatkitten 2y ago> Could a manufacturer placing this on a PC be considered material support of terrorism? No.
- yodon 2y agoIs this advertising campaign of theirs new? It seems like an absolutely terrible idea for a campaign "hey everyone - our company has been wildly successful at putting spyware on hundreds of millions of machines and no one even knows our name!"
- M95D 2y agoI had it in Lenovo X61 Tablet. It was called CompuTrace back then. It was a BIOS module that Windows executes while processing ACPI tables during boot. Now it's probably a UEFI module that does the same. I removed it by 0-ing out the module in a BIOS update image and reinstalling Windows. This method probably doesn't work with UEFI anymore because it invalidates the signature, so yes, it's unremovable.
- yencabulator 2y agoIt seems the "persistence" part depends on a Windows installation doing something specific. The year of Linux on the Laptop!