While the whole world is struggling to deal with the situation of an epidemic, a news about some very serious vulnerabilities from security researchers was a sudden distraction for many of us. According to security researcher Bill Demirkapi, a very popular software included with all the laptop and desktop computers manufactured by HP contains more than ten different vulnerabilities. This software is nothing else but “HP Support Assistant” that we all have come across. It has been installed on all HP computers from the year 2012 and is still being installed on computers running Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Bill Demirkapi has given all the details on his blog : https://d4stiny.github.io/Several-Critical-Vulnerabilities-on-most-HP-machines-running-Windows/.
In case you are wondering why do you need this software, HP Support Assistant allows you to access official HP support very conveniently. Using this simple software, you can manage your HP devices through the built-in automatic technical support functions. It can also be used to to update your system, or install new patches or hotfixes from HP server. HP Support Assistant also displays detailed product information about your HP hardware including your laptop, desktop, printers, scanners, storage devices and more. You can remove it from your system, but it is better to keep it installed to avail yourself important updates and support features.
While the recent versions of HP Support Assistant contained all the vulnerabilities discovered by Bill Demirkapi, HP Product Security Response Team (PSRT) has finally fixed the mentioned vulnerabilities and you can either wait for the download of the new version of HP Support Assistant software on your PC, or you can manually download the new version from the official HP website and install it on your Windows PC.
The setup installer for HP Support Assistant is more than 100 MB in size and supports Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. You can download HP Support Assistant from https://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/hpsupportassistant/hpsupport.html.