Lawsuit Filed Against Lenovo Over Superfish Fiasco

That didn’t take long: this week, Ars Technica reported that a lawsuit has been filed against Lenovo for its Superfish adware, which compromised users’ security in the name of pumping targeted advertising into their web browsers. The suit was filed in federal court by a San Diego-based blogger named Jessica Bennett, who charges that Lenovo violated state and federal wiretap laws, along with trespassing and unfair competition law violations.

The lawsuit explains that while writing a blog post for a client on her Lenovo Yoga 2 laptop, Bennett saw “spam advertisements involving scantily clad women appearing on her client’s website.”

The complaint continues:

“[Bennett] looked at a couple of other sites and did not see any advertisements, so she assumed the client’s website was the problem. She sent an email to her client suggesting that their site had been hacked.

A few hours later, [Bennett] was doing research for a different client when she saw the same block of advertisements intruding on a different, very well-known site. It was then that [she] knew that her computer was infected with Spyware.”

That spyware, of course, was Superfish, and it was put there by Lenovo when she bought her laptop. Needless to say, it’s not great.

Meanwhile, the Ars post reports that a law firm in Pennsylvania is asking Lenovo computer owners to get in touch with them about participating in a class-action lawsuit.

Don’t be surprised for Lenovo to try and settle with everyone out of court. The longer the Superfish story stays alive, the worse it is for Lenovo in the long run. Moreover, Lenovo would be unwise to appear unsympathetic to its users and their bad experiences here, so it’ll likely try to make things right with as many people as possible, as fast as possible. The company would be extremely foolish to try and actually fight this in court.

That said, Lenovo did put Superfish on computers in the first place, so it’s not like they’re batting a thousand in terms of corporate intelligence.

[Source: Ars Technica]