Lenovo’s bad month continues to get worse as the company noted tonight that their website was hacked by an outside force. This comes just days after the company took slow, but extensive action against the Superfish adware that was found to be installed on many Lenovo PC’s. That being said though, for the hackers who claimed responsibility, the action Lenovo took was not quick enough, or extensive enough. While the company did maintain a relatively reactive response to the issue as a whole – the adware that was found on PC’s and laptops wasn’t something that simply appeared overnight, and customers had just recently began complaining about. In fact, it was something that had been reported by users as early as mid-2014.
The collective known as Lizard Squad took responsibility for the attack, which also took control of the company’s email in addition to the domain name – which they control for their website. For users who visited the webiste during the attack they saw a rather bizarre image of a girl sitting in what looked like a bedroom. Clicking on the image led browsers to a Twitter account which criticized Lenovo for their use of Superfish. The company though was remaining quiet throughout the day and evening on the subject as it developed.
They acknowledged in a statement that “The domain name service server hosting Lenovo’s website was hacked. We do not have any further information at this time to share. We’ll update as soon as possible.” However, the questions around Superfish continue to pour in. While some, like Lenovo have maintained that it doesn’t have a big impact on the overall function of the computer – and doesn’t pose that great a risk to users – the Department of Homeland Security thinks otherwise. In fact, they pointed out in a statement previously, which caused much of the concern in the first place, that the hack would allow for SSL spoofing, which gives third-party hackers the ability to read web traffic that otherwise should not be read – and is otherwise considered “secure.” This though collectively comes at a time when many people still have the Sony Pictures hack fresh on their minds.
