Chinese computer manufacturer Lenovo has admitted that laptops shipped to stores and consumers in late 2014 had malware preinstalled.
You might want to read that again.
A major manufacturer with $38.70 billion sales in 2014 alone, has been selling computers that are actively invading their user’s privacy, enabling man in the middle attacks and basically undermining trust.
Meet Superfish. Actually, Don’t.
Central to this revelation is a piece of software – until recently considered crapware or bloatware – called Superfish Visual Discovery, a browser extension that ships preinstalled on Lenovo computers ostensibly as a technology to “find and discover products visually”.
Because obviously you can’t discover products with your ears.
The idea is that Superfish, present as a browser extension, analyses images that you view on the web, checks if they’re products, then offers “identical and similar product offers that may have lower prices”.
How does it work?
“The Superfish Visual Discovery engine analyzes an image 100% algorithmically, providing similar and near identical images in real time without the need for text tags or human intervention. When a user is interested in a product, Superfish will search instantly among more than 70,000 stores to find similar items and compare prices so the user can make the best decision on product and price.”
The problem is, not only is Superfish a browser hijack – anti-malware scanners will routinely remove adware tools that do the same thing – but there’s also the issue of the MITM vulnerability.
Remember Man in the Middle Attacks? Lenovo Does
Superfish doesn’t only hijack your browser to display ads. It also installs a self-signed root HTTPS certificate, an act that essentially renders HTTPS pointless, by intercepting encrypted traffic on every website you visit (HTTPS is the sauce that makes the web secure, and enables online banking, secure shopping, etc.). Evidence has been found that HTTPS site certificates are in fact signed by Superfish (rather than, say, your bank) and worse still (if you thought it couldn’t get any worse) the private encryption key is the same on all Lenovo computers!
This means fake sites cannot be detected by the web browser on a Lenovo PC.
To make matters worse, Rob Graham of Errata Security has cracked the encryption key that secured the Superfish certificate enabling anyone to launch MITM attacks upon PCs with that certificate installed.
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