HP today is rolling out a fix for its touchpad driver, which included a keylogger. The situation is similar to another that happened earlier this year, where there was a keylogger in the audio driver.
It was only eight months ago that a keylogger was found in an audio driver on HP laptops, and the company had to fix it. It would seem that the firm hasn’t learned from that mistake, as a similar situation is happening today.
This time, the affected driver is the Synaptics touchpad, and it can be found in over 460 HP laptops that came out as far back as 2012. These devices include those from the EliteBook, Spectre, Pavilion, and Envy ranges, among others. You can find the full list of affected laptops here.
The keylogger itself should be disabled by default, although it’s still a major security vulnerability. A third party could gain administrative privileges to activate it. As HP describes it:
In order to install the fix on your machine, you can check the security bulletin that we linked to above, where each machine’s individual new driver is listed. You should also be able to install it automatically via the HP Support Assistant app on your device.
Source: HP, BBC, PCWorld
