China-based Lenovo, the world's largest manufacturer of PCs, has released a programme to automatically remove Superfish, an aggressive advertising programme, from its machines. Pre-installed with Lenovo machines, Superfish shows additional ads during Google searches. However, it was quickly deemed a security risk, since it could be used to decrypt data transfers, as information technology experts recently discovered.
Lenovo has stated that Superfish hasn't been pre-installed since January, because so many users complained.
This has prompted it to first provide instructions on how to manually remove the application and then follow up with an automated tool to help users remove the software and certificate. Lenovo said it only became aware of the security risks after the experts' warnings.