Sunday 12 June 2016

Visual Studio 2015 C++ Compiler Secretly Inserts Telemetry Code Into Binaries


Reader

edxwelch

writes:

Reddit user sammiesdog discovered recently that Visual Studio 2015 C++ compiler was inserting calls to a Microsoft telemetry function into binaries. "I compiled a simple program with only main(). When looking at the compiled binary in IDA, I see a call for telemetry_main_invoke_trigger and telemetry_main_return_trigger. I cannot find documentation for these calls, either on the web or in the options page," he wrote. Only after the discovery did Steve Carroll, the dev manager for Visual C++ admit to the "feature" and posted a workaround to remove it.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the existence of this behavior to InfoQ, adding that the company wil bel removing it in a future preview build. For those who wish to get rid of it, the blog writes:

Users who have a copy of VS2015 Update 2 and wish to turn off the telemetry functionality currently being compiled into their code should add notelemetry.obj to their linker command line.


Read the full article here by Slashdot

No comments: