Lenovo released an automatic removal tool for the Superfish adware

Last week, the news of the presence of Superfish adware in the laptops sold by the Chinese Lenovo has captured the attention of the media. The presence of the Superfish malware exposes Lenovo users to hacking attacks, as explained by the cyber security expert Robert Graham in a blog post the malware hijacks and throws open encrypted connections, a circumstance that could be exploited by attackers to eavesdrop the users’ traffic.

Lenovo has intentionally pre-installed a malware on laptops, but once discovered has tried to remedy the problem by releasing a tool to remove the ,malicious “SuperFish” adware that the company had pre-installed onto many of its consumer-grade Lenovo laptops sold before January 2015.

“We ordered Superfish preloads to stop and had server connections shut down in January based on user complaints about the experience.  However, we did not know about this potential security vulnerability until yesterday.  Now we are focused on fixing it.”  states an official statement released by Lenovo. “We recognize that this was our miss, and we will do better in the future. Now we are focused on fixing it.”

Graham reverse engineered the malicious software in a debugger (or IDApro), the process allowed him to extract the certificate from the SuperFish adware and cracked the password (“komodia”) that encrypted it. By using the password an attacker can potentially inject malware or spy on a vulnerable Lenovo user sharing the same Wi-Fi network.