Free Republic

Windows Defender lives up to its name by dealing death to Dell's dumb DLL Microsoft has killed Dell's user-pwning root certificate and its self-reinstalling .dll with its antivirus Defender tool. The certificate is a big blunder because it opens a universal means for attackers on public networks to hose new Dell laptops. That's because bright minds planted a self-signed root CA certificate and private key on new laptops which allows attackers on public Wi-Fi to steal otherwise encrypted usernames, passwords, and other sensitive data. "An attacker can exploit a certificate using phishing or man-in-the-middle attacks to decrypt, modify or spoof...

Dell laptops are coming preloaded with a self-signed root digital certificate that lets attackers spy on traffic to any secure website. The reports first surfaced on Reddit and were soon confirmed by other users and security experts on Twitter and blogs. The root certificate, which has the power of a certificate authority on the laptops it's installed on, comes bundled with its corresponding private key, making the situation worse. With the private key, which is now available online, anyone can generate a certificate for any website that will be trusted by browsers such as Internet Explorer and Google Chrome that...