Lenovo Caught Installing Dangerous Adware on New PCs

Lenovo has been caught installing adware on new PCs. The software is called Superfish and on the face of it, the software appears to be your standard annoying adware with third-party ads plastered on various websites. It also has those terrible popup ads. However, some have suggested that this software may well be more dangerous than annoying.

Superfish essentially throws out ads on pages like Google that appear to match your search results. It seemingly does such a thing in Chome and Internet Explorer. It also provides annoying popups – something very common with adware. The thing is, Superfish is currently being disabled on new Lenovo machines after many users complained of such annoying popups. Now you’d think that’s a good thing, and that this story is now pointless as a result; well that certainly isn’t the case.

Lenovo community administrator, Mark Hopkins, said that the company would be temporarily removing the software on new systems due to these complaints. Shockingly, he said that the popups were “issues” that needed a “fix”, defending the software as useful in that it “instantly analyzes images on the web and presents identical and similar product offers that may have lower prices.”

It doesn’t stop there. There are now reports that Superfish is dangerous as well as annoying. It appears that the software is implementing a man-in-the middle attack by using a self-signed certificate authority, which allows it to decrypt secure connections, such as those to your bank account or when you’re making a purchase.

If all of this is true, it’s terrible for Lenovo, a trusted PC manufacturer, to be doing this to users’ computer new out of the box. Let’s hope Lenovo has something to say about it.

Source: The Next Web