In September 2008, PC Pro discovered through a reader that ASUS had shipped laptops that contained cracked and pirated software. Both physical machines and recovery CDs contained confidential documents from Microsoft and other organizations, internal ASUS documents, and sensitive personal information including CVs.
At the time, an ASUS spokesperson promised an investigation at "quite a high level", but declined to comment on how the files got on the machines and recovery media. It was demonstrated that an unattended installation of Windows Vista could accidentally copy material from a flash drive with a parameter in the "unattend.xml" file on the personal flash drive being used to script the installation.