Lenovo convicted users and forced installation of advertising applications

At the end of January, Lenovo confirmed at the official forum that the Superfish program was installed by default on their new laptops. This is a web-proxy, which analyzes user traffic, examines images of goods received by him, and inserts advertisements of these products found in third-party stores into the browser. Advertising appears on the pages of sites and search results in Google, while it is styled so as to fit organically into the content.









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The fact that Superfish uses a self-signed root certificate aggravates the situation, which allows it to listen to even encrypted HTTPS traffic. This system works for browsers IE and Chrome. Firefox using its own certificate store is not affected by the problem. As security experts note, the certificate for the program is one for all computers. If someone wants to extract a private key from it, then it will be possible, for example, to replace https-sites for all users of Lenovo laptops.















Complaints of buyers for the presence of adware began to arrive in mid-2014 . Forum users confirm the presence of a malicious program for models Y50, Z40, Z50, G50 and Yoga 2 Pro. The program runs with OSes. The process of visualdiscovery.exe can be stopped, and the program itself can also be removed from the computer — however, the Superfish root certificate is not deleted.



A company spokesman, Mark Hopkins, on the buyers forum said that they had temporarily suspended the installation of the program on new laptops. In addition, they asked Superfish to update the program due to user complaints about pop-up advertisements that sometimes work incorrectly. At the same time, he justifies the availability of the program by the fact that it “does not track the actions of users, algorithmically analyzing the pictures they receive” and “helps users find the best offers for the goods they are interested in.” In addition, when you first start the program provides the user with a license agreement. If you reject it, the program will not work.



Lenovo, a successful Chinese manufacturer of laptops, cell phones and other electronics, has recently been actively entering the global market. Customers note the good quality of the company's products at a low price. However, this behavior of the company may adversely affect its public image. Obviously, the Superfish program works for a certain percentage of store sales. In this regard, it seems a fair question on the forum of one of the users: "Is it not enough for you that we already paid for your products?".