Superfish Software on Lenovo Tablets Disabled Since January, Company Says

Lenovo shipped tablets that included Superfish software between September and December, but the software has been disabled since January, Lenovo said in a news release Thursday. Superfish lets consumers view more advertisements, but some privacy advocates consider the software a security threat. Superfish “tampers with Windows' cryptographic security to perform man-in-the-middle attacks against the user's browsing,” an Electronic Frontier Foundation blog post said Thursday. “This is done in order to inject advertising into secure HTTPS pages, a feature most users don't want implemented in the most insecure possible way,” it said. “Superfish technology is purely based on contextual/image and not behavioral. It does not profile nor monitor user behavior,” Lenovo said. “It does not record user information. It does not know who the user is. Users are not tracked nor re-targeted. Every session is independent.” Lenovo said it won’t use the software again.