Firewall block lojack

[overbet]

I have been struggling to get this big brother spyware off of my laptop since i discovered it and have had no luck. It is Absolute software computrace and it is in the bios and self regenerates if you end process on it. It cant be uninstalled to my knowledge. I have called and emailed Dell and Absolute and got no help or should say no help from Dell and no response from Absolute. My question is this, can anyone tell me how I might go about using a firewall to block the program from getting online? Perhaps this would stop it from invading my privacy. Thanks

 

[Ijack]

If it were as simple as using a firewall, then the program wouldn't be very good at it's job. I would suspect (I am only speculating here, but it's what I would do if designing such a program) that the software uses a well-known port, such as port 80, that will not be blocked by a firewall. So you might be able to defeat it by using an external firewall to block all outgoing traffic from your PC. But that rather defeats the purpose, and it would be easier to just disconnect the PC from the Internet.

And I would guess that it is clever enough to bypass a firewall running on the PC. Viruses can do this, even to the extent of running their own TCP/IP stack, so I would expect decent security software to be that clever. I may be wrong, it may just be a con and be easy to defeat.

A starting point would be to use network monitoring tools to see if you can determine what connections it is making to the outside world - this would then give you a starting point to try to defeat it.

But, as I said to start with, if it's any good at it's job then it won't be easy to block it.

 

[overbet]

Sent this to them last night, we'll see if that motivates them. Otherwise I will bomb some massive emails out to these addresses and a lot more.


Please do not continue to fail to respond to my email request. If I do not get a response to this request I will cc the top executives at your company as well as any other person or organization I deem fit from laptop suppliers to privacy rights organizations that you may not want attention from. I will also post regularly on every laptop review forum about the big brother nature of the lojack programs and inform everyone who cares to read what they are trading in exchange for this laptop theft recovery software that is on their computer no matter what but only functions to their benefit if they pay for it. You see I am certain this will alter the buying habits of many if they are aware that #1. it is possible their activity could be monitored and recorded constantly and # 2. The factory is putting software on their computers that is the definition of spyware that they have to pay additional money to benefit from and it can not be removed by them like the other bundled software manufactures put on machines (more commonly referred to bloatware that people deliberately try to avoid). As a courtesy I have refrained from including a copy of this email request to anyone outside of your company but if this request is ignored as my last one was I will take further action. I would like to know how to remove your spyware from my computer. I do not want this spyware on my machine and I refuse to be ignored. Here are a few email addresses I was able to find with 3 minutes of effort:

brad_anderson@dell.com, jeffrey_clarke@dell.com, brian_gladden@dell.com, steve_price@dell.com, ronald_rose@dell.com, karen_quintos@dell.com, david_johnson@dell.com, stephen_felice@dell.com, Clarence_Worthington@acer.com, Gregg_Prendergast@acer.com, Lenny_Pollak@acer.com, Joe_Castillo@acer.com, Richard_Black@acer.com, ming_wang@acer.com, mark_hill@acer.com, Rudi_Schmidleithner@acer.com, alison_williams@acer.com, Mark_Groveunder@acer.com, Terry_Tomecek@acer.com, customer_support@tacp.com, http://www.privacyrights.org/contact/Beth+Givens, http://www.privacyrights.org/contact/Paul+Stephens, epic-info@epic.org, infoaclu@aclu.org, comments@cauce.org, cme@cme.org, cpsr-info@cpsr.org, cyperpunks-ftp@csua.berkely.edu, gilc@gilc.org., coalition@privacy.org., privacyint@privacy.org, http://www.privacy@rights.org/, http://www.pirg.org/


http://epic.org/privacy/privacy_resources_faq.html

 

[fp2k1]

OMG you are stoopid.

 

[Guest]

If you're wanting to block the applications ability to connect out then you will need to know how it is communicating. I would first suggest installing Wireshark and let that capture logs for a while, then it's a matter of looking through the logs to see if you can identify destination addresses and ports. Given the nature of the application I expect trying to configure an application block in Windows Firewall could end up being quite time consuming.

You can get Wireshark here -> http://www.wireshark.org/