You will remember the scandal with the commercial company Superfish and Lenovo. Superfish basically became famous for the role it played in its collaboration with Lenovo.
Lenovo had made an agreement with specific advertising company which allowed it to use its technology on some of its laptops. It should be noted that such agreements are not unusual, as most laptops on the market have them software για να το δοκιμάσετε και άλλα πρόσθετα που συχνά αποκαλούνται junkware.
The problem with this deal, however, was that its homonymous software Superfish add a root certificate in a way that turned all computers that used it vulnerable to serious attacks.
Attackers could exploit the vulnerability to capture and intercept sensitive information from unsuspecting Lenovo customers.
But the company is known for more activities than that.
A study that became 2014, for example, found it to be one of the two largest advertising providers with ad-injection sites.
Ad-injections add or replace advertisements on websites and allocate their revenues to third-party companies and the administrators of the websites.
But what happened to Superfish?
If you try to open the Suerfish home page, you will see a simple statement rather than information about the company and its products.
"Η Superfish αλλάζει την εστίασή της - αλλά συνεχίζει να προσφέρει την πατενταρισμένη τεχνολογία οπτικής αναζήτησης στους εταίρους της. Αν ενδιαφέρεστε να συνεργαστείτε μαζί μας, επικοινωνήστε από το partners@suρerfish.com.".
Of course, Superfish's search technology continues to work, and the official website does not reveal whether something will change in the future.
The statement on the company's home page is no accident. In addition to the revelation of the Lenovo scandal, Google's decision to crack down on Adware came right after. (The decision is of course not altruistic, as Adware causes huge financial losses to its revenue serviceof the AdSense company)
A Google announcement says the company is trying to block such ads by removing browser extensions from the Chrome Store, basically changing its policy of Adware businesses that are treasuring at the expense of consumers.
Please note that Suerfish has 80 employees and revenue of about 40.000.000 dollars according to Wikipedia.
