What’s worse than Superfish? Meet PrivDog, leaving users wide open to attacks
Last week, a storm erupted on the net after it became widely known that Superfish – software that was being pre-installed on Lenovo PCs – could compromise users’ security and privacy.
The problem with Superfish was not just that it injected money-making ads into websites, but that it used a self-signed root certificate to intercept encrypted HTTPS traffic for every website users visited – replacing legitimate site certificates with its own.
As a result, a major security vulnerability was introduced, potentially allowing online criminals to launch man-in-the-middle attacks, and destroying any trust users might have had that their communications were secure. Superfish, you could say, had brought Lenovo into deep water.
