Lenovo hit with lawsuit over Superfish Adware

Lenovo hit with lawsuit over Superfish Adware

| Source: pcworld Author: Mark Campbell

Lenovo hit with lawsuit over Superfish Adware

Unhappy consumers have hit Lenovo with a class-action lawsuit over pre-loading the Superfish Adware on some of their consumer PCs. The lawsuit was filed late last week against both Lenovo and Superfish, charging both companies for “fraudulent” business practices as Lenovo PCs are made vulnerable to malware and malicious attacks due to the pre-loading of the adware.

Lenovo and Superfish are also accused of damaging their units by the installation of what the Plaintiff, Jessica Bennett, calls "spyware" and has accused the companies of making money by studying her internet habits and invading her privacy.

Jessica Bennet had purchased a Yoga 2 laptop in order to do business and communicate with her clients. After using the laptop for a while she noticed that "spam advertisements" were appearing on her clients websites, some of which included "scantily clad women", and after seeing similar ads on other websites see investigated the issue, assuming her laptop was hacked or had spyware. After scouring the internet from forum post to forum post, she found that there was similar behaviour in other Lenovo laptops, which she the found to be due to the Superfish adware.

More startling yet was the ability Superfish has to intercept otherwise secure communications and leave affected laptops vulnerable to attack.

Lenovo has issued this statement regarding the Superfish issue;

"We know that millions of people rely on our devices every day, and it is our responsibility to deliver quality, reliability, innovation and security to each and every customer. In our effort to enhance our user experience, we pre-installed a piece of third-party software, Superfish (based in Palo Alto, CA), on some of our consumer notebooks. The goal was to improve the shopping experience using their visual discovery techniques.



In reality, we had customer complaints about the software. We acted swiftly and decisively once these concerns began to be raised. We apologize for causing any concern to any users for any reason – and we are always trying to learn from experience and improve what we do and how we do it.



We stopped the preloads beginning in January. We shut down the server connections that enable the software (also in January), and we are providing online resources to help users remove this software. Finally, we are working directly with Superfish and with other industry partners to ensure we address any possible security issues now and in the future. Detailed information on these activities and tools for software removal are available here:



http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/superfish

http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/superfish_uninstall



To be clear: Lenovo never installed this software on any ThinkPad notebooks, nor any desktops, tablets, smartphones or servers; and it is no longer being installed on any Lenovo device. In addition, we are going to spend the next few weeks digging in on this issue, learning what we can do better. We will talk with partners, industry experts and our users. We will get their feedback. By the end of this month, we will announce a plan to help lead Lenovo and our industry forward with deeper knowledge, more understanding and even greater focus on issues surrounding adware, pre-installs and security. We are confident in our products, committed to this effort and determined to keep improving the experience for our users around the world."

Many anti-virus and spyware programs like Windows Defender are already removing the spyware from affected laptops, but who knows how many PC could have been attacked in the meantime.

Lenovo has not commented on the Lawsuit yet.

Hopefully this will start a movement for manufacturers to move toward a more stock version of Windows in their Systems in the future, as most of the software we find preloaded in our systems today are useless for most users to say the least. System makers will take note of this event and hopefully it will prevent similar events happening in the future.

You can join the discussion on Lenovo getting hit by a lawsuit over Superfish on the OC3D Forums.

Lenovo have been hit with a lawsuit over pre-loading Superfish Adware on some systems. http://t.co/AtFuzce0my pic.twitter.com/q1soiO8lhH — OC3D (@OC3D) February 23, 2015

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