Dive Brief:
- Lenovo Group apologized to buyers of its laptops for preinstalling Superfish software that may have exposed them to hacks and unauthorized monitoring.
- Superfish’s technology dissolves the encryption between browsers and sites that handle payments and other personal information, exposing users to hacking.
- Numerous complaints forced the company to stop selling laptops with Superfish installed and posted links with to uninstallation instructions via Twitter.
Dive Insight:
Lenovo, the world’s biggest computer manufacturer, is apologizing to customers as it works to help remove preinstalled software that leaves them vulnerable to cyberattacks and identity theft. The software is installed on many laptop computers sold during the last four months of 2014, but not on desktops, smartphones, or notebook computers.
The suspect software, Superfish, employs image-recognition algorithms to track where users point on their screens and target them with ads. In doing so, however, the software breaks the encryption between web browsers and sites handling credit card numbers, passwords, email messages, and other sensitive personal information.
Following numerous complaints from users and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the company stopped installing Superfish and issued instructions on software removal.
