Make sure you physically disconnect the internet when rebooting after an update!!:
A friend of mine was doing some work in the Windows 7 OS and came across something unexpected...
QUOTE
Basically after digging through the coding & cleaning it up, i found another phone home, but this one only ran when an update was installing & disconnected before the end of the update install.. what scared me was it didnt just send information of the current o/s, but sends information of all apps on system & all usernames & passwords..
Which as you can guess this i cannot work out why its in there... i've checked this against multiple windows 7's & they all seem to do the same thing at the same time.. normally it'd get missed, but i only found it due to the coding doing something weird at that point...
This means every time the system has rebooted during an update it sends out all your private data - even if you don't store passwords it also sends out the contents of the cache so unless you specifically cleaned that it will still have your info. What's more this info is not just sent to MS, but part of the code indicates that after arriving there it gets redirected to an unknown third party address.
This is probably not official coding but is the work of someone within MS who used their position to insert some extra code. Even if it is official, it can easily be accessed by third-party programs (ie viruses) and modified to send the info to a new third party. Such a modification would be virtually undetectable because it runs exclusively under cover of the reboot while your av and firewall are still disabled.
Since it only sends info during the reboot it can be defeated by simply unplugging your internet after the update has finished downloading and keeping it unplugged until after the update is fully installed.
A friend of mine was doing some work in the Windows 7 OS and came across something unexpected...
QUOTE
Basically after digging through the coding & cleaning it up, i found another phone home, but this one only ran when an update was installing & disconnected before the end of the update install.. what scared me was it didnt just send information of the current o/s, but sends information of all apps on system & all usernames & passwords..
Which as you can guess this i cannot work out why its in there... i've checked this against multiple windows 7's & they all seem to do the same thing at the same time.. normally it'd get missed, but i only found it due to the coding doing something weird at that point...
This means every time the system has rebooted during an update it sends out all your private data - even if you don't store passwords it also sends out the contents of the cache so unless you specifically cleaned that it will still have your info. What's more this info is not just sent to MS, but part of the code indicates that after arriving there it gets redirected to an unknown third party address.
This is probably not official coding but is the work of someone within MS who used their position to insert some extra code. Even if it is official, it can easily be accessed by third-party programs (ie viruses) and modified to send the info to a new third party. Such a modification would be virtually undetectable because it runs exclusively under cover of the reboot while your av and firewall are still disabled.
Since it only sends info during the reboot it can be defeated by simply unplugging your internet after the update has finished downloading and keeping it unplugged until after the update is fully installed.