Study Shows Lenovo, Other OEM Bloatware Still Poses Huge Security Risk
from the history-repeats-itself-history-repeats-itself dept
Lenovo hasn't had what you'd call a great track record over the last few years in terms of installing insecure crapware on the company's products. You'll recall that early last year, the company was busted for installing Superfish adware that opened all of its customers up to dangerous man-in-the-middle attacks, then tried to claim they didn't see what all the fuss was about. Not too long after that, the company was busted for using a BiOS trick to reinstall its bloatware on consumer laptops upon reboot -- even if the user had installed a fresh copy of the OS.Now Lenovo and its bloatware are making headlines once again, with the news that the company's "Accelerator Application" software makes customers vulnerable to hackers. The application is supposed to make the company's other bloatware, software, and pre-loaded tools run more quickly, but Lenovo was forced to issue a security advisory urging customers to uninstall it because it -- you guessed it -- opened them up to man-in-the-middle attacks.
The vulnerability was discovered by Duo Labs as part of a larger report on the security of pre-installed OEM software (pdf). The study found consistent security problems specifically in the software used by OEMs to keep all the other bloatware updated. Such software pretty consistently failed to make even basic use of TLS, properly validate update integrity, or verify the authenticity of update manifest contents, leaving consumers at consistent risk of remote attack. It also found that some companies even had multiple software updaters that occasionally served duplicate purposes, most of which were trivial to exploit:
"Updaters are an obvious target for a network attacker, this is a no-brainer. There have been plenty of attacks published against updaters and package management tools in the past, so we can expect OEM’s to learn from this, right? Spoiler: we broke all of them (some worse than others). Every single vendor had at least one vulnerability that could allow for a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacker to execute arbitrary code as SYSTEM. We’d like to pat ourselves on the back for all the great bugs we found, but the reality is, it’s far too easy."And again, to be clear, Lenovo wasn't alone in being incompetent here. In fact, the firm tried to find any vendor whose bloatware didn't pose a security risk, and they couldn't actually do so:
Turns out we couldn't find any OEM laptops that _didn't_ have remote code execution: https://t.co/xLFwhYuprX
— Jon Oberheide (@jonoberheide) May 31, 2016
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Filed Under: adware, bloatware, computers, spyware
Companies: lenovo
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Let's be reasonable here
There's good money in shoveling crapware onto unsuspecting customers, money that might decrease if they actually had to make their software secure, so expecting them to stop dumping it on people isn't likely to happen any time soon.
Instead focus on making to so that people can more easily remove said crapware and secure their own systems, something that both decreases the risk to the owner of the device it was previously infecting and offers up the perfect opportunity to point and laugh when the crapware vendors start whining about how people are uninstalling their rubbish programs.
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Re: Let's be reasonable here
So if the other vendors are making money off of their bloatware in order to compete, what gives? They're not developing the hardware specifications themselves for the most part, and they don't develop their own OS or software for the most part.
So why aren't they making more money off of the bloatware?
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Re: So why aren't they making more money off of the bloatware?
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Re: Re: So why aren't they making more money off of the bloatware?
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Re: Let's be reasonable here
That's what I call "bad money". It's like a hairdresser clandestinely taking the earrings of customers and selling them. You are ruining your reputation and your principal business.
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Re: Re: Let's be reasonable here
"OK so it ruins the haircut, but you can always uninstall the feces you don't want once you get your haircut home"
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The sad fact
They expect their PC to be insecure. Until PC users make purchasing decisions that reflect the negative aspects of the insecurities, the vendors will continue to not care.
Ultimately, customers need to put a value on security. I think that most do not value security because they believe that being vulnerable is inevitable.
The problem is compounded by the lack of choice. The only mainstream choice is which vendor will abuse the customer with insecure crapware. There are no mainstream crapware-free choices.
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Update Repositories
This way a vendor could setup a model specific repository and just point the user to that / have a single URL that they click that asks the user to confirm adding the repo to Windows Update.
Of course they'd never do this, because the point isn't to keep users up to date, it's to deliver junk-ware and vendor lockin...
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Re: Windows Update REALLY should have a /list/ of repositories to install packages matching a given form from.
Until it got C&D letters from Adobe and other proprietary software vendors, claiming violation of their Int****ctual P**p**ty rights...
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Now we have the OS makers like Microsoft trying to get ahead of the game by turning the OS into an advertising platform complete with data mining.
It's getting to where you can't find a secure OS much less a computer. At this point, even Linux isn't the answer as the NSA has been sure to have had it as an aiming point all along.
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Re:
Linux had reasonable protection from the NSA, it is built from source by multiple people in multiple countries. These people control what servers their builds talk to.This makes it very high risk for spy agencies to try to plant software that calls home into Linux, especially as it would have to distribute the source code. Oh, and Snowden has made the task much harder, as more people will be casting a critical eye over the source code, and monitoring outgoing, connections, and some of them would very much like to give uncle Sam a black eye.
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Microsoft = Scylla, Intel = Charybdis
Customers put up with this, because it means cheaper PCs. You can get crapware-free PCs, but they cost more. If you want a laptop without Windows, for example, you can go to ZaReason or System76, but expect to pay a higher price for freedom. Most people don’t bother.
Even Microsoft is feeling a bit of a pinch in its profit margins. So it is resorting to the crapware game, too, with Windows 10...
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Windows Update?
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