Dell has been shipping an SSL certificate on a number of its laptops, generating security concerns that hackers could misuse the certificate to spy on web traffic.<br />After being made aware of the problem yesterday, Dell says "we deeply regret that this has happened and are taking steps to address it."<br />Unlike Lenovo's Superfish scare, Dell claims its certificate isn't used for adware.<br />"It was intended to provide the system service tag to Dell online support allowing us to quickly identify the computer model," says a Dell spokesperson.<br />"This certificate is not being used to collect personal customer information."<br />Dell has posted instructions to permanently remove the certificate from affected systems here, and the company will also publish a software update today that will automatically check for the certificate and remove it.<br />The company has not confirmed how many machines are affected.
