Microsoft helps Lenovo clean up Superfish adware

Recently, news broke out that Lenovo had pre-installed Superfish, a malware afflicted software which made laptops vulnerable to hackers. Though the company said that they would stop pre-installing this software, they have also released a tool to help users remove the adware from their laptops.[caption id="attachment_259243" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Daily number of unique machines detecting CompromisedCert, our detection for Superfish pre-installed on Lenovo machines.[/caption]Now, according to Microsoft's malware detection data, Superfish has been removed from 2,50,000 Windows PCs. Microsoft reveals that the number of infected PCs were around 60,000 on February 21, and have now reduced to around 3,000.The company has reportedly helped clean up a quarter of a million Lenovo PCs from February 20 to March 4 using its Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) that includes a set of 'fingerprints' to detect and delete malware.Along with Microsoft, Lenovo and McAfee had also released their tools to cleanse Superfish. Lenovo has also published its step-by-step guide for users to manually fix the adware.The Superfish adware is capable of installing a fake root certificate into the Windows certificate store that appears to be genuine.  The browser will trust all the fake certificates generated by Superfish, paving way for hackers to easily crack into it.