Superfish vulnerability adware pre-installed on computer systems
Sat 21 February 2015 virus / superfish / adware /
Through the years computer manufactures in a bid to provide, “more for less”, tend to package together software with their hardware. This software usually fits fairly well with the PC and is normally quite useful to the new pc owner. However sometimes this does go wrong, as in the recent events when a company pre-loaded software on to a range of their notebooks, and it was discovered that it was in fact adware. Adware, can be defined as any software package that as the ability to automatically display unwanted advertisements with the end intention to generate revenue for the owner of the adware software. Advertisement can be displayed anywhere at anytime on the ‘infected’, machine, and is generally quite annoying. Adware, also has the possibility of running in-built functionality this is generally used to allow the adware author to focus advertisements based on your browser history. But basically it can analyse the internet websites you visit with your internet browser. In this case adware developed by an American advertising company, was found to be a potential security threat for its users as it allowed potential cyberattacks including inception of passwords and sensitive data traversing through the webbrowser. 20th Feb 2015, American Homeland Security has recommended that people using Lenovo notebooks remove this software completely from their machine to avoid potential cyberattacks. What is quite disturbing here is that the underlying libraries used by this adware is also used with a family security product called KeepMyFamilySecure. During research it turns out that there are many software packages currently known to be effected by this issue. Vendor Category Date Notified Date Updated Atom Security, Inc Affected 20 Feb 2015 20 Feb 2015 KeepMyFamilySecure Affected 19 Feb 2015 20 Feb 2015 Komodia Affected 19 Feb 2015 20 Feb 2015 Kurupira Affected - 20 Feb 2015 Lavasoft Affected 20 Feb 2015 20 Feb 2015 Lenovo Affected 19 Feb 2015 20 Feb 2015 Qustodio Affected 19 Feb 2015 20 Feb 2015 Superfish Affected 19 Feb 2015 20 Feb 2015 Websecure Ltd Affected 20 Feb 2015 20 Feb 2015