Inquiry about Computrace

Question

Hey all,

A few months back, I bought a Dell Extreme Rugged Latitude 7214 from eBay (used, without a hard drive). I inserted a drive into the slot through caddy, installed a Linux distro, etc. and am pleased with my experience. However, recently I opened the BIOS and was looking through its settings, and noticed this feature called "Computrace" is enabled.

I've done some research about what it is, and, based on what I've found, it seems you have to contact the company to potentially have it disabled (or replace the motherboard lol).

However, my inquiry is whether or not this Computrace has any actual effect on my computer, since it's running Linux instead of Windows (I saw a comment online that said it only matters if some .exe is running, which wouldn't hold on Linux). That is, can Computrace keylog, track my activity, my geolocation, etc?

Thank you for all the help in advance!

ejn63 · Accepted Answer

The good news is that it's unlikely the previous owner (or company) would be interested in tracking the system.

The bad news is that once enabled, Computrace is essentially a rootkit -- it can be exploited by an attacker. And it cannot be disabled once enbled.

So -- if you 're worried about the security issue, plan on replacing the mainboard -- and plan on insisting the seller of the board provide one where the locator was never enabled.

ejn63 · Accepted Answer

It's hardware (probably more correctly, firmware) on the mainboard.

entirely_clueless · Answer

@ejn63​ Is Computrace a hardware-level compromised issue? Or would flashing a new BIOS system like Coreboot be able to resolve this? What are the full capabilities of Computrace? It seems like I greatly misunderstood the level of a problem this could be. Thank you for your help!

entirely_clueless · Answer

Thanks for the info!

ejn63 · Answer

Search for 'computrace security vulnerability' -- you'll find lots of information out there.

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Inquiry about Computrace

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