Not-So-Fun Stuff Found on Some ASUS Notebooks

I’ve mentioned in the past that ASUS makes some killer notebooks, and I stand by that, since almost every one I’ve ever touched has pleased me. What I never saw on any of the notebooks, though, were software cracks, employee résumés or internal company documents. No, I wouldn’t be so lucky. Some folks in the UK were though, and it didn’t take long before the news exploded all over the net.

The obvious question was “how?”… how on earth could illegal files, résumés, internal documents and even source code find it’s way onto thousands of notebooks all over? Well as it turns out, one employee came out in an interview to explain how it happened, and sadly, it’s not that exciting.

To cut a long story short, it turns out that due to how Windows is mass-installed, files found on the same source thumb drive as the required XML file will get copied over to a set folder without confirmation. So, some unwise employee had more than he should have had on his thumb drive, and soon enough, thousands of customers had the data also. Woops… bet that mistake won’t be made again.

An OEM employee (name not mentioned here) discussing the matter said that during the vista installs, the generic vista disc installing the OS looks for an XML file (unattend.xml) on a flash drive, and upon finding it the installation parses it and runs the XML code as installation instructions so nobody has to go through the installation menu for the hundreds of synchronous installations (hence the unattend).