Lenovo earned $250K with Superfish

Lenovo bagged a paltry US$250,000 from the deal that saw it install the Superfish certificate slurper onto PCs, according to reports.

The PC maker was last month caught installing the ad/bloat/malware into its consumer PCs, sparking a very considerable backlash once the software's ability to intercept encrypted website communications was revealed.

Forbes sources' now say Lenovo made between US$200,000 to US$250,000 from the deal to pre-install Superfish, a paltry amount given its net profit was US$253 million in the three months to December.

At $250,000 the return on investment for Superfish is abominable: Lenovo initially defended the installation as a helpful tool for online shoppers, but quickly back-pedalled and started wheeling out senior execs at all hours of day and night to make apologetic utterances.

Some users swore off Lenovo kit as the company began scrubbing Superfish, promising to never again install bloatware, and offering free six month subscriptions to McAfee antivirus.

Mozilla, meanwhile, has decided to blast Superfish with its hot lizard breath. The outfit will eradicate self-signed Superfish certificates from the latest version of its Firefox web browser, following through with its initial musings reported by El Reg.

Machines with the adware still installed will not have the certificate removed to ensure access to HTTPS websites is still possible.

The Superfish PR disaster has also snowballed into a lawsuit initiated by Californian woman Jessica Bennett, who filed against Lenovo and Superfish claiming the “malware” injected smut images into her Yoga laptop.

Source: TheRegister