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Lenovo Hit With Lawsuit Over Superfish Adware
An anonymous reader writes with news that the fallout from the Superfish fiasco might just be starting for Lenovo. "Lenovo admitted to pre-loading the Superfish adware on some consumer PCs, and unhappy customers are now dragging the company to court on the matter. A proposed class-action suit was filed late last week against Lenovo and Superfish, which charges both companies with 'fraudulent' business practices and of making Lenovo PCs vulnerable to malware and malicious attacks by pre-loading the adware. Plaintiff Jessica Bennett said her laptop was damaged as a result of Superfish, which was called 'spyware' in court documents. She also accused Lenovo and Superfish of invading her privacy and making money by studying her Internet browsing habits."
I hope it costs both of them twice what they earned
The EULA that is part of clicking through to use the PC states Superfish's conditions.
This lawsuit will be tossed out before it ever hits a court of law, just because EULAs have a legal precedent of being incredibly enforceable.
We've seen how much energy is wasted when customers try to sue to get refunded for the Windows license they don't use on their PC. Why would this turn out better? Yeah, it sucks that they did it but the big difference here is someone caught them doing it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
how about the security flaws in the spyware? if it's a "BFD" go ahead and install it on you own system.
small operation businesses often source cots equipment, and cant afford a dedicated IT dept to produce and maintain system images.
this means they get crapware in a business seting.
I have a feeling this is less about recovering from damages and more about teaching them a formal lesson (well, cashing-in under the guise of teaching them a formal lesson).
I think we all want Lenovo's feet held to the fire for this one, but what is the right course of action? A class action lawsuit, that benefits few people in the class, but enriches lawyers... Or a criminal prosecution under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for aiding malicious actors in installing their malware/spyware?
The reason for the lawsuit is so that, the next time Lenovo or any other computer maker is deciding whether to include some adware or browser hijacker with their Windows OS install, they decide against doing so because of legal liability.
Companies care more about the bottom line than anything else. Computer makers will not stop putting crapware on computers until it costs more for them to add the crapware (via lawsuit settlements, etc.) than they get in kickbacks from the crapware makers.
Yeah it's a BFD, Lenovo took money to install an application that deliberately reduced end user security for the sake of inserting ads into their browsing activities! Not only is it completely bereft of ethics and respect for their customers, it's actively dangerous.
They shouldn't just be hit via a class action suit (assuming Lenovo isn't sticking a "binding arbitration" clause to defeat the ability for consumers to seek recourse) but Federal prosecution under one of the many computer security laws that would string up anyone else.
This fine bloatware didn't merely act as an MiTM, it do so so incompetently that it exposed the user to basically any MiTM attack on an SSL connection(the root cert it used to sign bogus certificates was identical across every installation and effectively unprotected and the MiTM component would re-sign any cert handed to it, even an invalid one, opening the user to downright trivial MiTM attacks.
Even if the actual behavior of the bloatware were downright saintly(which is not the case) it was so incompetently constructed as to be indistinguishable from malice.
Which is why it should be a criminal or regulatory investigation instead. However, because of the way our legal system is put together, this kind of DIY justice is pretty much the only option. People resort to class action lawsuits because prosecutors and law enforcement have written themselves out of responsibility and delegated enforcement of such laws to the consumer. Many laws and regulations are ONLY triggerable via class action lawsuit.
The loss of time and effort to figure out whether this is going to cause a problem and then the time and effort to get rid of it.
That loss is obvious not much on a dollar per user basis, but if you add up all those users it's enough to incent Lenovo to do something so scurrilous. That's precisely the situation which class action lawsuits exist to redress, and according to the article that's the kind of lawsuit that has been filed.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'm not usually one to celebrate lawsuits. And you're right, there's not a lot of individual damage per computer. Rather, I'm perfectly fine with a modest payout per users that punishes Lenovo for this, both monetarily and with bad press. This sort of behavior absolutely has to stop, and I'm willing to enrich a few lawyers to make it happen. Sacrifices must be made for the greater good, I suppose.
Maybe this will wake people up to the fact that we seriously need some stronger consumer privacy laws. I'm also typically one who prefers to let markets manage themselves until it's clear that government actually needs to step in. I'm afraid we're at that point, because it's abundantly clear that too many companies are willing to go to just about any lengths to extract personal data from people in unscrupulous ways (as well as the government itself, ironically, but we'll tackle that issue separately).
So, yeah, it is actually a BFD. In fact, not every business customer uses their own system image - especially smaller business. And just because a personal user chooses specific services like Google whom they may trust, it does not give another company the right to make those decisions on their behalf. Many of those customers may well have chosen to avoid such services for that very reason. That choice was taken away from them, and instead, the computer they paid for was made less secure by that adware which was forced on them unknowingly. Fine, it's a first world problem, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I have a feeling this is less about recovering from damages and more about teaching them a formal lesson (well, cashing-in under the guise of teaching them a formal lesson).
That's the entire point of a class action suit. To stop powerful companies from doing a large number of small harms and getting away with it.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I fail to see what kind of financial loss Lenovo customers might have incurred over this incident to warrant a class action suit.
Even if the class action suit only wins one penny, it will be worth it. Having a verdict on this issue can set a legal precedent (especially since Lenovo is probably not interested in defending the case too hard either).
For instance, it could pave the way for more easily winning a class action against Verizon. Verizon's case is a bit different, especially now that they're supposedly giving their customers the option to opt-out, but with a little bit of luck, a quick verdict on the Lenovo case could make Verizon reconsider its ongoing super-cookie/man-in-the-middle attack strategy against its own customers.
If it isn't a big deal, does that mean you will import my certificate authority public key as fully trusted into your computer and point your DNS client to my servers?
No?
Well now you might see why it is a big deal after all.
This fine bloatware didn't merely act as an MiTM, it do so so incompetently that it exposed the user to basically any MiTM attack on an SSL connection(the root cert it used to sign bogus certificates was identical across every installation and effectively unprotected and the MiTM component would re-sign any cert handed to it, even an invalid one, opening the user to downright trivial MiTM attacks.
Many "enterprise" (lol) class proxies (deployed by corporations to "protect" their internal networks") do the exact same thing.
To be honest, that is poorly worded. As you pointed out, ISPs typically do that, as well as many websites, like Facebook. However, if the suit was phrased in a way that included the act of a MITM attack, I'd like to think it has some teeth.
Hasn't worked too well, has it? Class action is a trivial business expense compared to what is gained. What should happen is a revocation of the corporate charter, and all revenues and properties seized a la *civil forfeiture*.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It's a common refrain to say that nobody benefits from class action suits except the lawyers. While that may be true for the class litigants themselves it is entirely untrue for the public at large. The purpose of large punitive rewards is to penalize corporate misbehavior and in turn incentivize good behavior. By that measure we all benefit from these suits.
I think it should be clear to everyone now. Lenovo is not IBM and it may have managed to retain some of the reputation of the IBM branding that went with its computers. But with one mistake it has managed to wipe that all away with SuperFish. I learned my lesson a couple years ago that Lenovo was not IBM and it would never be anything close. I would not buy another Lenovo PC if they sold them for a dollar. I hope Lenovo pays dearly for this mistake, and I hope other PC makers see this as a lesson to not sell out its customers to some two bit crapware company to earn a few bucks.
This is exactly the sort of crap everyone was predicting when IBM sold their PC line to Lenovo.
The only thing that surprises me is that it took so long.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Their network, their rules. A company doing this sort of thing on their own hardware, which is there for employee work purposes, is not comparable to Lenovo shipping millions of consumer units with this stuff surreptitiously installed.
That’s simple assuming anyone in the US actually gives enough of a damn. If fines are levied on Lenovo as a result of this lawsuit, US Customs would be within their power to seize any Lenovo merchandise shipped to the US at the border until all fines are paid in full.
That’s a pretty good whack in the bottom line for any company, regardless of the nation in which they’re located. As long as they expect to sell their widgets to people physically located in the United States, US law can trivially be applied to them in such a way that they would need to comply before they may continue to operate profitably.
Whether this suit will be successful of course is a completely different story, but there’s no problem enforcing any judgement which may emerge from it.
If the Class Action is successful, then other companies could be sued too. Samsung started accidentally inserting ads right into television broadcasts while a show was playing recently. They built their ad serving infrastructure right into the televisions they sold. Samsung and Lenovo are stealing internet bandwidth to show their self serving ads, and without users' knowledge, as well as compromising the security and privacy a user should expect to have.
I expect Lenovo will get a lot of support from corporations like Samsung in this class action suit because of the ramifications the outcome of the case has for the other corporations.
Many "enterprise" (lol) class proxies (deployed by corporations to "protect" their internal networks") do the exact same thing.
Totally different:
1. In a proxy, the key used to sign MITM traffic is on a device not accessible to anyone but the admins, not stored on a PC (probably improperly secured) that other malware could access.
2. A good proxy will check certs on the server side of the connection. The one we use will either "pass through" certificate errors, or allow us to block sites with invalid certs entirely.
3. A proper setup will use the URL categorization to not MITM certain traffic. We decrypt anything that's blocked (you have to in order to deliver a block page without cert errors), but that's not a big deal since it never even talks to the server. We also don't decrypt healthcare, banking, shopping, etc.
The slideware published on government attempts to undermine SSL web traffic suggests they are supremely interested in trying anything they can.
Getting a trusted cert with a key they control installed on a large number of laptops is a dream come true.
So who is actually behind Komodo?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
"She also accused Lenovo and Superfish of invading her privacy and making money by studying her Internet browsing habits".
To me, this was more interesting than all the rest. It has the potential to break the big telcos, cable companies, Google, and anyone else who makes a living by tracking your browsing habits to server you "targeted advertising".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
There's also the basic difference that 'enterprise' MiTM-ing is potentially kind of a dick move, depending on exactly how hard HQ feels like squeezing somebody's innocent checking of their email over lunch or whatever; but it's a fairly clear exercise of control over hardware by that hardware's owner.
Seeding hardware with malware and then selling it? Not so much. Yeah, maybe there is some nonsense clickwrap EULA; but there is no real consent of any kind, or even a proper warning.
If only for your own sake(having your own employees getting fooled because your MiTM proxy re-signs bogus certs without flagging them would be counterproductive) odds are that 'enterprise' systems are also more competent; but even if they aren't it's a pretty major difference in scope.
In my own admin-ly capacity, playing content cop is something I do reluctantly, and only as much as network security requires; but we never tamper with devices we don't own(deny them access to the network, sure, touch them, never) and staff are proactively warned and welcome to ask in more detail, if they wish, about what we do and why we do it.