Dell has been shipping an SSL certificate on a number of its laptops, generating security concerns that hackers could misuse the certificate to spy on Web traffic. After being made aware of the problem yesterday, Dell said, “We deeply regret that this has happened and are taking steps to address it.” Unlike Lenovo’s Superfish scare, Dell claims its certificate isn’t used for adware.
“It was intended to provide the system service tag to Dell online support allowing us to quickly identify the computer model,” said a Dell spokesperson. “This certificate is not being used to collect personal customer information.” Dell has posted instructions to permanently remove the certificate from affected systems, and the company will also publish a software update today that will automatically check for the certificate and remove it.
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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