Dell is one of the most famous laptop manufacturers on the planet, with sales of tens of millions of units annually, but despite the popularity of its products, the company does not bother to ensure the security of users.
It was recently discovered that Dell used a security certificate in its laptops that can be exploited by hackers to gain access to the laptops' identification information, so a hacker can figure out whether a laptop belongs to a certain person or not.
Moreover, hackers can use these certificates to monitor the Internet traffic made by users on Dell laptops, so we are talking about a serious security problem that Dell products have at the moment.
The problem is similar to the one that Lenovo had a few months ago when the Superfish adware was running on laptops sold to users worldwide, and although the Dell people ironed out that problem, now they are affected by one similar.
It was intended to provide the system service tag to Dell online support allowing us to quickly identify the computer model. This certificate is not being used to collect personal customer information.
The Dell Inspiron 5000, XPS 15, and XPS 13 laptops are sold with this problematic security certificate, but no one knows how many units are actually affected, so no one knows for sure just how big the problem Dell has in the present moment.
Despite this, Dell has published instructions for deleting that certificate and will offer an update that will automatically delete that certificate, but the problem itself will not be forgotten too late, nor should it be otherwise because users must know what exactly they spent their money on.
