WINDHOEK – Chinese giant technology company, Lenovo, stands accused of selling personal computers and laptops with spyware that tracks customers’ every move online and render the computers vulnerable to hackers. The spyware on the computers is said to be so deadly that it can render vulnerable to hacking any banking and e-commerce site visited by the owner of a Lenovo laptop or computer. However, Lenovo South Africa says it had stopped loading its product with Superfish in January after learning of the disastrous experience from customers.
Lenovo sells its computers installed with Superfish, a particularly pernicious form of adware that siphons data from a user’s machine via web browser. Lenovo is the world’s largest PC manufacturer.
South Africa’s Timeslive.co.za reported that a 25-year-old South African veteran of the financial services technology industry made the discovery after buying a new Lenovo Yoga 2 Notepad at a computer retailer in Sydney, Australia.
Even though the PC came with McAfee anti-virus software, Horne said, he installed anti-virus software made by Trend Micro. Neither virus scanner picked up any adware on the machine.
Superfish’s “visual discovery” adware, Horne and others now say, is far more intrusive than typical adware. It drops ads into a user’s web browser sessions and can also hijack a secure browsing session and scoop up data entered into secure websites.
Superfish does this so it can introduce ads into an otherwise encrypted Web page, but the way it does so compromises the security of trusted websites and makes it easy for other hackers to intercept communications.
Lenovo South Africa says it thought the Superfish product “would enhance the shopping experience”, but realised that “it did not meet our expectations or those of our customers. In reality, we had customer complaints about the software.
“We acted swiftly and decisively once these concerns began to be raised. We apologise for causing any concern to any users for any reason – and we are always trying to learn from experience and improve what we do and how we do it.” Lenovo adds that they never installed the software on any ThinkPad notebooks, nor any Lenovo desktops or smartphones.