Warning for Lenovo PC owners

[Death Whisper]

FYI:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/0...ty-its-laptops

News broke last night that Lenovo has been shipping laptops with a horrifically dangerous piece of software called Superfish, which tampers with Windows’ cryptographic security to perform man-in-the-middle attacks against the user’s browsing. This is done in order to inject advertising into secure HTTPS pages, a feature most users don’t want implemented in the most insecure possible way.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015...s-connections/

Lenovo is selling computers that come preinstalled with adware that hijacks encrypted Web sessions and may make users vulnerable to HTTPS man-in-the-middle attacks that are trivial for attackers to carry out, security researchers said.
The critical threat is present on Lenovo PCs that have adware from a company called Superfish installed. As unsavory as many people find software that injects ads into Web pages, there's something much more nefarious about the Superfish package. It installs a self-signed root HTTPS certificate that can intercept encrypted traffic for every website a user visits. When a user visits an HTTPS site, the site certificate is signed and controlled by Superfish and falsely represents itself as the official website certificate.

http://www.imore.com/lenovo-reminds-...better-get-mac

Lenovo, by injecting Superfish adware into its Windows laptop PCs and leaving them open to man-in-the-middle attacks, has so fundamentally betrayed its customers that every one of them should immediately consider switching to the Mac.

[Marion]

I've been reading about this the last couple of days. It's a potentially nasty software package that is being loaded by the manufacturer. Seems they will install anything for the right price.

Sure am glad I stayed with Dell all these years.

[Man]

Thank god we just left them for HP. Wow thats a good way to loose buisness quickly.

[WCB]

They will change their name in a few months and keep selling...

[Death Whisper]

For the TL,DR crowd: (excerpted from the above links)

If you purchased a Lenovo laptop recently (we have observed reports of the Superfish cert from the Decentralized SSL Observatory as early as October 2014), you can check if your machine is vulnerable here.

And:

If you're afflicted with Superfish, Lenovo has posted resources on how to remove the damage to your system:

• http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/prod...rity/superfish
• http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/prod...fish_uninstall

You wouldn't be faulted, however, for getting a clean version of Windows and reinstalling from scratch. Better still, if you have to run Windows, get a PC from a Microsoft Store that's adware free. Otherwise, seriously, consider switching to Mac.

[Death Whisper]

TTT for the weekend crowd

As said above, if you have to have a Windows PC get one from a Microsoft Store so it will be adware and crapware free.

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/cat/categoryID.69404700

[Playa]

Is this laptops only? We have Lenovo "desk tops" at work. I hate them, they are a huge piece of crap (albeit in a tiny container).

Would love to have a reason to get rid of them