US government urges Lenovo users to remove Superfish, but the software maker denies security risk

It’s been a rough few days for Lenovo. Now even the United States government is urging users to remove the Superfish adware.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a warning today alerting users that the software causes infected computers to be vulnerable to a type of SSL Spoofing cyberattacks, according to a report by Reuters.

In a statement we received from Superfish itself, however, the company claims its software is safe and that the malicious aspect that’s been reported was unintentionally caused by a third party. You can read the statement in full below:

There has been significant misinformation circulating about Superfish software that was pre-installed on certain Lenovo laptops. The software shipped on a limited number of computers in 2014 in an effort to enhance the online shopping experience for Lenovo customers. Superfish’s software utilizes visual search technology to help users achieve more relevant search results based on images of products they have browsed.

Despite the false and misleading statements made by some media commentators and bloggers, the Superfish software does not present a security risk. In no way does Superfish store personal data or share such data with anyone. Unfortunately, in this situation a vulnerability was introduced unintentionally by a 3rd party. Both Lenovo and Superfish did extensive testing of the solution but this issue wasn’t identified before some laptops shipped. Fortunately, our partnership with Lenovo was limited in scale. We were able to address the issue quickly. The software was disabled on the server side (i.e., Superfish’s search engine) in January 2015.

Superfish takes great pride in the quality of its software, the transparency of its business practices, and its strong relationship with the Superfish user community. Superfish’s visual search technology enables millions of people to explore and learn about the world in an engaging and highly intuitive manner. A positive user experience has been the cornerstone of Superfish’s success.

If you haven’t been keeping up, Lenovo was caught installing adware onto new computers, which came with some glaring security issues.

The company has since disabled the software and provided removal instructions. It initially downplayed the severity of the risks, but now has admitted the software poses a real problem.