Dell SupportAssist Bug Exposes Business & Home PCs Let Hackers Attack Hundreds of Million Dell Computers

A high severity vulnerability resides in Dell SupportAssist for Business & Home PCs allows a low privileged user to execute arbitrary code with admin privileges on vulnerable installations.

The Dell SupportAssist is a monitoring tool that comes preinstalled on most Dell devices running Windows operating systems.

It automatically checks for system health, if any issues detected it will notify Dell for troubleshooting.

Dell SupportAssist is the smart technology that keeps your computer running at its best, Customers with Premium Support or Premium Support Plus with the feature, reads Dell statement.

Uncontrolled Search Path Vulnerability

A low privileged user could exploit this vulnerability to cause the loading of arbitrary DLLs by the SupportAssist binaries, resulting in the privileged execution of arbitrary code, reads Dell advisory.

This vulnerability would occur if the application uses the directory search path to find executables, but the path allows contains a directory that can be modified by an attacker.

If the attacker gained access to the locations searched by the software, the attacker can place a malicious library that can be loaded by the application.

The vulnerability can be tracked as CVE-2020-5316 and received a CVSS Base Score: 7.8. Following are the affected versions

Dell SupportAssist for business PCs version 2.0, 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.1, 2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.1.3

Dell SupportAssist for home PCs version 2.0, 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.1, 2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.1.3, 2.2, 2.2.1, 2.2.2, 2.2.3, 3.0, 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.2.1, 3.2.2, 3.3, 3.3.1, 3.3.2, 3.3.3, 3.4

Fixed Versions

• Dell SupportAssist for business PCs version 2.1.4
• Dell SupportAssist for home PCs version 3.4.1

Dell advises users to update with the latest version at the earliest, if you have auto-update enabled, then it will get updated automatically.