Lenovo offers US consumers compensation for Superfish adware deliveryad

Lenovo will pay US consumers who bought laptops from the company in 2015 a total of $7.3 million in compensation for shipping the Superfish adware. That intercepted secure connections and made users vulnerable to hackers.

The money will go to any American who can prove that he or she had Superfish VisualDiscovery on his Lenovo laptop, Hackread reports. The settlement is part of a settlement reached by Lenovo in a lawsuit in the Northern California District Court. He recently approved the settlement.

Lenovo had previously reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission about providing Superfish VisualDiscovery. That happened last year. Superfish itself will pay out about a million dollars. There is no known settlement for people outside the US, such as in the Benelux, where VisualDiscovery was also on laptops.

The Chinese manufacturer supplied the adware in early 2015 and stopped it after complaints came. The software ran in the background and injected advertisements into websites with product image pop-ups. The software also made it possible to eavesdrop on https traffic. Laptop manufacturers almost always provide their system with extra software, sometimes from third parties for a fee. Adware that displays pop-ups is rare, however.

Ceci n’est pas adware (just an image of the adware)