Lenovo to Pay $7.3 Million in Settlement for Installing Adware on 800K Notebooks

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Lenovo reached a settlement deal in a class action suit filed by consumers who discovered that their privacy and online security was affected after Superfish's VisualDiscovery was pre-installed on their laptops, as reported by Bloomberg Law.

"In early 2014, Lenovo and Superfish entered into a business partnership to install Superfish software called VisualDiscovery on 28 of Lenovo’s laptop models. VisualDiscovery was not disclosed to consumers," says the motion for preliminary approval (PDF).

According to a "SuperFish Vulnerability" advisory published by Lenovo on their support website following the discovery of the pre-installed software by consumers, the VisualDiscovery comparison search engine software was designed to work in the background, intercepting HTTP(S) traffic with the help of a self-signed root certificate that allowed it to decrypt and monitor all traffic, encrypted or not.

The same Lenovo advisory regarding the SuperFish pre-loaded software says that the Lenovo Notebooks affected were the E-Series, the Edge Series, the Flex-Series, the G-Series, the Miix-Series, the S-Series, the U-Series, the Y-Series, the Yoga-Series, and the Z-Series.

Source: https://news.softpedia.com/news/lenovo-t...3990.shtml