HP Help and Support Center helps hackers

If you support HP laptops in your organization, look out. Apparently the HP Help and Support Center--a utility for care and maintenance that ships with every HP laptop--contains a serious security vulnerability that could be exploited by a hacker to seize control of a Windows XP machine. According to HP, the vulnerability "exploits a buffer overflow condition, which may [allow] a malicious website to read or write files on the PC." HP has released an update for the utility as an .exe file that needs to be manually installed. If you deploy stock HP laptops in your organization (i.e. if you don't install a standard image or otherwise remove the pre-installed utilities), you may want to completely uninstall the utility, just to be safe.

For more on the vulnerability:
- see this ZDnet blog entry