Lenovo website downed by Lizard Squad

Lenovo Supefish
Lenovo Superfish

Lenovo's consumer website was taken down by a cyberattack just days after the full extent of its Superfish adware campaign was laid bare.

The attack saw site visitors directed to a Twitter feed that criticised the Superfish debacle before it was later taken offline by Lenovo with the infamous Lizard Squad hacking collective claiming responsibility for the attack.

Hackers carried out the attack by taking control of the site's domain registrar and redirecting traffic to a free account at San Francisco-based CloudFlare, the company later disabling the account used by the attackers.

The group is reportedly made up of hackers based across Eastern Europe and the UK, and was heavily linked to a series of hacks that resulted in serious outages for the PlayStation Network at the end of last year.

Lenovo going to court

Lenovo may have preloaded the Superfish adware onto consumer laptops as far back as 2010 and it allowed them to control the way that third-party ads were displayed in search engines on the machines.

It has already come out to apologise for the action, although that wasn't before the US government advised citizens to get rid of the adware and there is even a class action suit against the company from customers distraught at the way Lenovo has acted.

Via: CNET