With the private key known to the public, an attacker can easily spoof any HTTPS certificate and systems that are infected with Superfish will just trust it. In fact, it was reported that, CEO of Errata Security has already cracked the certificate and revealed the private key. This level of encryption is weak and susceptible to attack.

Superfish uses this ability to do things to your encrypted connection including collecting data, and injecting ads.Īs if that wasn’t bad enough, their certificate is actually using a deprecated SHA-1 certificate that uses 1024-bit RSA encryption. This is essentially a man in the middle attack performed by software installed by Lenovo. Your PC will trust it, because it already has the root certificate installed. Instead, you’ll receive a certificate signed by Superfish. If you visit your online banking portal for example, you won’t actually get the certificate from your bank. Then, the software uses its own certificates for every single HTTPS session the user opens. The software actually installs a self-signed root HTTPS certificate. Superfish is a somewhat extreme case of this.

A lot of PC’s come with software pre-installed that collect usage statistics for the manufacturer. You may wonder what makes this case so special.

Well now we can add Superfish spyware to the list. Usually there are system tools, antivirus software trials, and a whole bunch of other things that most of us never wanted in the first place. If you’ve ever purchased a new computer then you are probably familiar with the barrage of bloatware that comes pre-installed.

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