And played with your hard drive, then lost it in a game. I don't apologize for that 90's reference as stores have been playing a lot of 90's music lately. That, and it seems appropriate for what Lenovo is doing to their customers. The best way to explain what's going on is underhanded. Six whole months after the
backlash of the
Superfish snafu and even getting
hit with a lawsuit, Lenovo has given the middle finger to it's customers again.
This issue hasn't been given a fancy name yet, but it's just as much of a security issue as Superfish. Taking advantage of the Windows Platform Binary Table, a feature Microsoft added that allows software to be installed during the boot sequence of a computer. Lenovo is using their Lenovo Service Engine to install their custom software [bloatware]. One of the problems with this is that it will persist even if the hard drive is formatted. The process to remove this software has been posted
here. You can see in that forum post that many are confused by what they see and that it persisted through a clean install of Windows.
Lenovo has made an
official announcement. The [minor] good news is that systems made after June has a BIOS firmware update that removes the LSE service, and Think-branded laptops have had it removed already. What is frustrating is that Lenovo is taking advantage of it's customers and doing things to their products that someone shouldn't be doing. As the old saying goes "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." For those who are tech savvy, you may want to reconsider any recommendations you have of Lenovo.
And as always, stay safe goblins.
Jimmy Tassin is the IT Manager of Midwest Regional Bank and has been involved with the Technology field for over thirteen years. His two hobbies are overseeing the daily operations of OmniKraft, a Minecraft server community, and writing at Goblinbyte.com.
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