Lenovo recently released a product security advisory about a man-in-the-middle attack vulnerability that exists on some of the Lenovo Notebook laptop models sold by the company between Jan 2014 until Feb 2015.
A program called SuperFish intercepts all internet traffic using a self-signed root certificate that is stored in the local certificate store and provides a security concern. Superfish is an advertising company that develops various advertising-supported software products. The Superfish software has been described as malware or adware by security experts and anti-virus softwares. On February 20, 2015 the United States Department of Homeland Security advised uninstalling Superfish and its associated root certificate because they make computers vulnerable to serious cyber-attacks, including interception of passwords and sensitive data being transmitted through the Internet browser.
Lenovo says “SuperFish was previously included on some consumer notebook products shipped between September 2014 and February 2015 to assist customers with discovering products similar to what they are viewing. However, user feedback was not positive, and we responded quickly and decisively”.
While the the company will no longer be including Superfish in its pre-loaded factory OS image, there are still many laptops that remain infected with the malware. Lenovo laptop owners are urged to take actions to remove the program from their computer.
Lenovo laptop owners can remove the malware from their comupter by downloading a Superfish removal tool from the laptop manufacturers website here:
http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/superfish_uninstall
Alternatively Lenovo laptop owners can take their laptop to a computer repair store in their neighborhood to have Superfish removed.
Is My Lenovo laptop infected with Superfish?
Chances are yes if you purchased your Lenovo laptop at a big-box store. However if you purchased your Lenovo laptop from South City Computer, we have already removed this malware during the initial set up of your laptop.
Joe Vaccaro is the Alderman of the 23rd Ward in Saint Louis City. He is very involved with the community and frequently passes on tips and information about dangers to people in the community.
Phishing, pronounced like “fishing”, is where a malicious website is set up in order to trick users into divulging personal information such as log in credentials, credit card, banking, or other private information. These website can look very convincing, mimicking a bank website, or a credit card website, or even a social media website log in. The website is meant to fool the user into divulging private information. Many of the sites will actually take in the information that is typed in the form, and then send the user over to the real login website, so that the user thinks that they just didn’t put in their log in information correctly, and never realize that they just gave away their personal information to a scammer. 
While there is no fool proof way to avoid being hacked, here is a list of tips in order to avoid from getting hacked.
As banks have beefed up their cyber security in the recent months after a JP Morgan Chase announced a data breach, hackers seemed to have turned their sights onto healthcare providers and insurance companies. Last week medical insurance company Anthem publicly apologized to its customers for a data breach that could have leaked over 80 million records that included names, addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers. The company has described the data breach as a “very sophisticated external cyber-attack”. Anthem is still investigating whether the hackers were able to obtain any sensitive medical records or patient history. The data breach could be one of the largest in history.
Are you getting a pop-up in Internet Explorer with the following:
The Internet can be very tricky at times, much like the streets of a large city, people can easily be fooled if they don’t use their “street-smarts” in every situation they encounter online. People who let their guard down online can easily be fooled into installing unwanted spamware, ransomeware, malware, virus, trojans, or worms. Avoide the following 10 most common ways our customer’s typically have gotten a computer virus on their computer.
Watch out for a new piece of malware and spyware that has been popping up on many computers that are coming into our computer repair shop in St. Louis this past couple months. Malware is short for “malicious software” and is unwanted software that can hijack certain functions of your computer, steal sensitive information, and can put your personal information and data at risk. Malware is usually bundled with tojans, worms, rootkits, spyware, adware, ransomware and viruses. Unfortunately most malware can be very tricky to remove. The new malware we have been seeing has no easy removal method at this time and reeks havoc on the computer’s Windows registry. The Windows registry is the place where Windows stores Operating System and program configurations.