No, this isn’t a cleverly disguised double entendre, we really mean it. Keep your software off our hardware! The recent reports of Lenovo preloading Adware Superfish onto their laptops is only one of several recent indications that hardware suppliers may not have our best interests at heart.
Earlier this week it was announced that Lenovo had infected its own computers with an Adware product called Superfish. This software injects itself into search results provided by other providers like Google and Bing to provide additional revenue opportunities to Superfish advertisers. Lenovo claims “The intent was to supplement the shopping experience.” but it was really to supplement income through ad sales. But this gross invasion of our privacy was made worse by the fact that the adware interfered with SSL encryption making everything else the user did in the browser, ANY browser, insecure. Hackers could pick off bank account numbers, SSNs, or anything else sent from infected PCs directly off the wire.
But Lenovo’s sleazy back-door attempt to sell us products we don’t want was only the most recent invasion of our hardware. Security experts at Kaspersky also recently announced that the NSA has the ability to infect hard drive firmware to implant spyware directly onto our systems for surveillance purposes. This hack affects all of the major hard drive manufacturers including Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, Micron, and IBM. Another report coming out of the UK says that British and US intelligence agencies hacked into worlds largest SIM card manufacturer and gained access to a huge amount of the world’s cellular communications. Our privacy is under constant attack from governments, foreign and domestic, and now even by the hardware manufacturers themselves.
While I expect this issue will only get worse as PC and mobile phone manufacturers scramble to squeeze every penny they can get from their customer base, there are a few things you can do to protect yourself.
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