ASUS shipping illegal keygen crack and confidential docs with some laptops

In a case repeating itself across ASUS discussion forums, some ASUS laptop owners are finding confidential and personal software along with an illegal keygen software hack bundled with their new rigs. According to readers of PC Pro and APC Magazine, a directory on the ASUS-branded Vista recovery DVD contains illegal software serial numbers, confidential Microsoft documents intended for PC manufacturers, and a variety of ASUS documents and source code. A reader in ASUS' forums claims to have found other bizarre files including someone's resume (pictured above). For its part, an ASUS spokesman has responded saying, "We will be investigating this at quite a high level." Well, then that's that.

Read -- PC Pro
Read -- APC Mag
Read -- ASUS forum screengrab

[jared @ Sep 18th 2008 6:44AM]

How much investigation is it going to take with the person's resume in the folder!

[Sudo @ Sep 18th 2008 6:53AM]

It could have been planted there by someone who hates the person.

[404 @ Sep 18th 2008 6:53AM]

That might not be their resume, that person may have given it to them to run an eye over it before they applied for a position or something like that.

It'll put them pretty damn close, though.

Someone is going to need a new job, methinks.

[Silvio @ Sep 18th 2008 9:17AM]

This story is based on a forum post which is probably illegitimate. Don't believe everything you read in a gadget blog.

[no_one @ Sep 18th 2008 9:23AM]

I smell fire all overhere.

[OneLove @ Sep 18th 2008 3:18PM]

The resume indicates that the person is already looking for a new job. (...with pirate bay?)

[老外 @ Sep 18th 2008 6:46AM]

中国加油！

[untitled @ Sep 18th 2008 6:57AM]

Indeed, but how will get the anteater to eat lick pretzels off your stomach with you while watching Juno in the first place?

[老外 @ Sep 18th 2008 6:58AM]

你的英文比我的差！你脑子坏了吗？

[Alex @ Sep 18th 2008 7:21AM]

WHAT?? My mother was a saint! TAKE THAT BACK!

[G Man @ Sep 18th 2008 7:31AM]

That guy meant "Rock On, China!" in his first post.

[nicko.dvz @ Sep 18th 2008 8:54AM]

Google seems to think he said:
"China refuelling"
...either that or:
"Canada-China oil" - it's the new canola.

[Andrew @ Feb 2nd 2009 2:54PM]

Asus is Taiwanese.

[dramamoose @ Sep 18th 2008 4:48PM]

有什么不对，中国 Engadget?

[Bill Jobs @ Sep 18th 2008 9:33PM]

Watch your language! This is a family blog!

[Decoy @ Sep 18th 2008 6:45AM]

Well, did they get the job?

[Chris @ Sep 18th 2008 6:56AM]

"One of the confidential Asus documents includes a PowerPoint presentation that details "major problems" identified by the company, including application compatibility issues."

wow. just wow.

Somebody is getting fired.

[Bufsabre @ Sep 18th 2008 6:49AM]

my asus f3ka doesnt have it in the directory i can see from that windows, asus would win favor in my eyes for this personally, but im a scumbag so dont take my word for it

[r3n @ Sep 18th 2008 6:50AM]

"You have 40 days to register WinRAR."

[OneLove @ Sep 18th 2008 3:20PM]

yeah, couldn't find a crack for winrar. :) (I love that prog.)

[Cristian @ Sep 18th 2008 7:13AM]

It's very usual for manufacturers to forget info inside one computer and then clone it to the rest. It happened to me.

[Apple @ Sep 18th 2008 7:14AM]

I want to see what all of it was

[Beau @ Sep 18th 2008 7:24AM]

Now I want an ISO image of that DVD ;)

[millerboy @ Sep 18th 2008 7:25AM]

if you look at the other screen grabs from here you will see more of the goodies

http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?board_id=3&model=M51Sn&id=20080819155904843&page=1&SLanguage=en-us

files are in windows\configsetroot. if you have an asus laptop, see if you have anything in here

[telepheedian @ Sep 18th 2008 8:37AM]

Nothing on my 1000h.

[MikeN @ Sep 18th 2008 7:27AM]

EEEKK, Stuff like this in USA leads to getting fired and some time in court - you know legal crap.. But in out countries they might take the person out back and you get the point. I'm just confused by this because it seems that the docs are in Chinese (forgive me if it's something else) But then you have the " resume by lauren ".

Maybe it was a pissed off American Employee or something, I find it hard to be a mistake i'v never once put my personal files on any of my clients drives or disks.

I will say one thing, I would love to be a fly on the wall at asus right now !!

[Hadi @ Sep 18th 2008 7:41AM]

I have an Asus G1S and do not currently have the recovery DVD with me. But after reading up the links, I found a set of pictures under windows/ConfigSetRoot/PIC which show some Asian people posing, and these has got nothing to do with me. The pictures were last modified in March 2007, and I did not buy my new computer until August 2007!!!

[xanarchistx @ Sep 18th 2008 8:33AM]

lol I checked my F3Sv- A1 as well, and I have the same pics. I think this is installed on all ASUS laptops.

[Warren @ Sep 21st 2008 11:18PM]

I have an Asus G1 (the model just before the G1s) and I have those same pictures!! I also found a K-light codec pack and a few executibles but I don't want to run them. Give it a try :)

[KilgoreTrout @ Sep 18th 2008 7:30AM]

"Yes your honour , in my laptop I found P2P and bit torrent programs preinstalled that without my knowledge started to download copyrighted material from the web".
I dunno, but somehow I doubt that it would stand up in court.

[Wwhat @ Sep 18th 2008 8:20AM]

From the web?

[dorothy12662 @ Sep 18th 2008 7:58AM]

yes, i've read about this. someone mentions it here http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=245933 and http://apcmag.com/forum.htm?g=posts&t=504 and if you google you will find even more reports about this...

[x3qt0r @ Sep 18th 2008 8:02AM]

What!? No porn??!!

[Wwhat @ Sep 18th 2008 8:21AM]

Well, no complaints about porn at least, that's not quite the same as no porn.

[Joe Schmoe @ Sep 18th 2008 8:27AM]

Wait, you can register WinRar??? And all this time i thought it was just freeware! ;-)

So... what team was it? I'm sure we'd all love to know which of our beloved pirates made the cut of being an official OEM release, hehe. Air? H2O? Come on, tell me, tell me!

[Str1ker @ Sep 18th 2008 8:41AM]

LOL! Go Asus!

[yokken @ Sep 18th 2008 8:50AM]

i love when stuff like this happens.

[Necrotix @ Sep 18th 2008 9:24AM]

...must... check .... eeepc ...cd ...asap!

[Rowan @ Sep 18th 2008 9:39AM]

In my windows\configsetroot folder i have so far found
Winrar keygen
DriverStudio compuware key and license file
Lots of Microsoft docs on how OEM activation works

Still looking around as its hard to tell what of this stuff is legit and what is not.

[Jason Litka @ Sep 18th 2008 12:13PM]

So, how does activation work? Anything interesting in there?

[Jash Sayani @ Sep 18th 2008 9:44AM]

Cool. I didn't know that even these guys use keygens... ;)

[Patriks7 @ Sep 18th 2008 10:04AM]

My Acer I had about a year ago came with a couple *interesting* movies if you get my drift :p

[anebg @ Sep 18th 2008 10:05AM]

Hackers paradise..

[Suburbancowboy @ Sep 18th 2008 1:40PM]

I wonder if the are "Taking this seriously"

[Fernando @ Oct 1st 2008 7:34PM]

I worked for a small OEM helping them to deploy an unattended Vista Installation and creating recovery DVDs. When you preinstall windows on a machine, you must put the Vista DVD, and a thumb drive with an unattend.xml file, which includes ALL the information that Vista requires to install. So it won't ask anything during the installation, and after it's done it will reboot in Audit mode, which allows us to preinstall software, configure drivers, etc. There is an option on the unattend.xml file that tells it to copy EVERYTHING from the thumb drive to Windows\ConfigSetRoot\, we used this option to copy company images for background, EULA, small icons, oemlogo, etc. It seems like whoever prepared this image, had all this information on its thumb drive, and didn't know that it would be get copied .. or just forgot about it.

[Amerist @ Sep 18th 2008 4:32PM]

That makes complete sense now. Thanks for shedding some real light on this. I like it when people with inside knowledge can help explain how something like this could have happened.

[Rowan @ Sep 18th 2008 10:31PM]

Do you happen to know if anything in the ConfigSetRoot folder is need for the computer to work correctly.

[Cscamp20 @ Sep 18th 2008 9:47PM]

This is bull! now why would asus do that!

[Rowan @ Sep 18th 2008 10:31PM]

I sent an email to Asus, this is the reply i got back.

"Good Morning

Please be advised that the issue is being investergated.

Please call 1300 27 87 88 and ask for Level 2 Technical Support to arrange for your machine to be booked in so the Hidden partition and your media can be replaced

Thank you "
Note: the 1300 number above is for Australians.
I may give them a ring but there is no chance in hell i will send them my computer just to delete some files. I may however send them my recovery disk in for replacement.

[asusoncrack @ Sep 19th 2008 5:26AM]

an update from someone who had the files on his laptop: http://apcmag.com/forum.htm?g=posts&t=504&p=3

"Asus were very unwilling to help and even went as far as trying to tell me that I am at fault for using pirated software. Can you believe the nerve of that guy I spoke to?

Winrar has acknowledged to me that it was indeed an illegal keygen for Winrar and I have passed on all information and data to them. They were so appreciative of my contacting them with this issue that they gave me a lifetime Winrar keyfile.

UPDATE: I contacted Bing Lee who I bought the Asus Notebook from, and they were horrified to learn about this. Asus admitted to them that there was a "issue" with illegal software on their Vista DVD. Bing Lee was so understanding and empathic of my situation and my uncomfortability in dealing with Asus anymore due to the abusive conversation I had with one of the Asus staff members, that Bing Lee offered me a full refund. I was invited with VIP treatment into their store to pick out a brand new latest notebook. Bing Lee was wonderful and so helpful. I was impressed with how they looked after me."