[Cryptography] Lenovo laptops with preloaded adware and an evil CA

[Henry Baker]

At 07:02 AM 2/22/2015, Jerry Leichter wrote:
>For all you know, your conversations are being tapped by GCHQ/NSA, the Russians, the Chinese, the Germans, the Israelis, the North and South Koreans, and who knows who else, all at the same time.

"Somewhere in the Middle East, there is a computer we are calling the
“The Magnet of Threats” because in addition to Regin, it was also infected
by Turla, ItaDuke, Animal Farm and Careto/Mask.  When we tried to analyze
the Regin infection on this computer, we identified another module which did
not appear to be part of the Regin infection, nor any of the other APTs."

-- From the Kaspersky Lab Equation Group Q&A.
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Perhaps Superfish is just the tip of the Lenovo malware iceberg ?

I'm amazed that any actual work gets done by any of our computers anymore,
given the % of cycles devoted to running ten different types of malware,
some sort of antivirus program, and downloading a new version of every
program, _every time that program starts up_.  And each of these programs
downloads at least 100 MBytes of bloated, festering, bandaided code with
an ever-increasing attack surface.