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Lenovo Software Update Stealthily Installs Adware

Posted by timothy on from the if-goodwill-means-absolutely-nothing-to-you dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A recent Lenovo automatic software update has the great feature of displaying annoying pop-up ads for Lenovo products. What's worse, it appears that many users are unable to turn the advertisement 'feature' off, subjecting them to pop-ups every couple of hours. Gee guys, a note about your 20% off sale in my e-mail wouldn't have bothered me that much, but you really had to pop up over top of my PowerPoint slides? I'm sure that all of my office colleagues will be running to order ThinkPads ..."

10 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Wait... by MyLongNickName · · Score: 5, Funny

    It hid some guy's PowerPoint presentation? I'd consider that a feature not a bug.

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    1. Re:Wait... by TommydCat · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Funny, but this is a serious credibility whack as their products are considered top notch for business. They'll find out when they interfere with business being done, it's a long fall down...
      Somehow I think someone in management is busy whacking the undo button as furiously as possible as the media exposure rises.

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    2. Re:Wait... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Toshiba can't give you the same SKU globally. Of course, we're a lot bigger organization - 90,000 machines, half of them notebooks - all of the notebooks Lenovo. No large company allows the Lenovo software (if it is even installed; it isn't on ours) to auto-update. So we will never notice this. It wouldn't update anyway even if it was loaded since our users are not administrators. If it wasn't for seeing this on Slashdot I'd never see it. BTW, these notebooks seem to be pretty darn good. Their docking solutions seem about the best available.

      Since you are looking for business desktops, take a look at the dc7900 and later from HP - they are pretty nice machines (we've been using HP for our desktops).

  2. Hmmm. by y_axis · · Score: 5, Funny

    Annoying ad pop-up or Death by PowerPoint? Nope. Can't decide.

  3. No kidding! by C_Kode · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I ran into this problem the other day. It ask you if you do not want to show the ads anymore, but it doesn't accept your answer and shows them over and over. I finally figured out what app was causing it and disabled it in msconfig. I can't remember what it was right now, but when I get home I will reply to this with the name of the app to disable.

    btw, I got the adware when I installed the Thinkpad Wireless software.

    1. Re:No kidding! by Skuld-Chan · · Score: 5, Informative

      If you uninstall "message center plus" it fixes it.

  4. Lenovo has officially jumped the shark by religious+freak · · Score: 5, Informative

    The last thing Lenovo wanted to happen is to dilute the Thinkpad brand and screw up a good thing, when they purchased thinkpad from IBM. Knowing this, I bought a Thinkpad, and the thing totally blows, their customer service is bad and they install way too much crapware on the PC by default (even more than the average manufacturer). Way to go guys...

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  5. compatibility by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I wonder if it's compatible with the rootkit that Sony so kindly installed for me?

  6. Change of Plans by Deton8 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wow, that's an incredibly stupid thing for Lenovo to do. I was about to order a Lenovo for my next laptop and if it worked out I was going to ask our IT department to change from the current incumbents (Dell and Sony) to Lenovo for our sales and executive staff. I'm going to wait to see that this issue is fully resolved before making a move, and if they don't fix it, they can forget about 20 to 30 laptop orders a year from my company. I don't think my emotion would be unique -- I'm sure 90% of IT managers would disqualify Lenovo if they knew about this spam pop-up problem and didn't have an easy way to disable it enterprise-wide. Billions of dollars are at risk for something that probably only brings them a few hundred K$ per year. Bone-headed.

  7. Re:Its over by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They were already on their way out the moment they were purchased by a foreign company with some degree of state control.

    (Yeah, even the "domestic" companies foreign-source most of their parts but at least the system design is domestically controlled.)

    I work for a defense contractor, the moment the Lenovo buyout happened we stopped buying Thinkpads and went to Dell. It was pretty much mandated by the customer. (If I recall correctly, there were a lot of news articles about the government banning further Thinkpad purchases post-Lenovo across the board around that time.)

    Now, Lenovo has effectively done just what the US government feared they might do - try to sneak stuff onto customers' machines for their own gain.

    Who knows what else in addition to this adware is getting slipped to customers?