You might remember the scandal involving the advertising agency Superfish and Lenovo. Basically, Superfish became famous for the role it played in its partnership with Lenovo.
Lenovo had made a deal with the advertising company that allowed it to use its technology on some of its laptops. Such deals are not uncommon, as most laptops on the market come with trial software and other add-ons that are often called junkware.
The problem with this particular deal, however, was that Superfish 's software of the same name added a root certificate in a way that made all computers using it vulnerable to serious attacks. Attackers could exploit the vulnerability to record and steal sensitive information from unsuspecting Lenovo customers.
But the company is known for more activities besides that.
A study conducted in 2014, for example, found that it is one of the two largest companies supplying advertising with ad-injections on websites.
Ad-injections add or replace advertisements on websites and allocate their revenue to third-party companies and website administrators.
But what happened to the advertising agency Superfish?
If you try to open the Superfish homepage, you will see a simple statement and no information about the company and its products.
The statement states:
“Superfish is changing its focus – but continues to offer its patented visual search technology to its partners. If you are interested in working with us, please contact partners@superfish.com.”.
[su_box title=”Declaration” box_color=”#048805″ radius=”1″]Superfish is currently transitioning our focus – but we are still offering our patented visual search technology to partners. If interested in working with us contact partners@surerfish.com[/su_box]
Of course, Superfish's visual search technology still works, and the official website doesn't reveal whether anything will change in the future.
The statement on the company's homepage is not accidental. In addition to the revelation of the scandal with Lenovo, Google's decision to combat Adware came immediately after. (The decision is of course not altruistic, as Adware causes huge financial losses in the company's AdSense service revenue)
A Google announcement says the company is trying to block these types of ads by removing browser extensions from the Chrome Store, essentially changing its policy on adware businesses that profit at the expense of consumers.
It should be noted that Superfish has 80 employees and revenues of approximately $40,000,000 according to Wikipedia.
