Lenovo’s pre-installation of the Superfish adware is one of the biggest fuck-ups the company could have made, but at least it’s cleaning up fairly quickly: it created a custom uninstall tool to clean your computer of the program and its certificates, and in a responsibly transparent move, also posted the source code and license of the removal tool for scrutiny.
https://gizmodo.com/lenovo-joins-the-malevolent-side-of-the-online-advertis-1686922941
If you’re running any Lenovo computer (or even if you just think you might’ve accidentally installed Superfish) it’s worth testing your machine to check if it’s infected. As a reminder: Superfish might look like it’s just annoying adware, but a side result of the way it works makes you vulnerable to phishing attacks and fake websites.
Other good news: the latest update of Windows Defender also stripped out Superfish and the certificates it left behind, so hopefully, anyone with a functioning internet connection should be patched. [Lenovo]
Photo by Vertes Edmond Mihai
