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Lenovo Still Wants to Own Your Box

posted by janrinok on Wednesday August 12 2015, @11:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the flash-me-a-bios dept.

Anonymous Coward writes:

It turns out that Lenovo has code in their BIOS which creates and maintains a backdoor executable in Windows 7 and Windows 8.x installs. Simply wiping the machine when you bring it home to remove the factory crap-ware is not enough to overcome this implementation. This issue is supposed to have been resolved via a recently released patch that doesn't remove but rather disables this 'feature' which is being called the Lenovo Service Engine.

Original Source for the news:
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=29497693&sid=ddf3e32512932172454de515091db014#p29497693

Link to patch:
https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/lse_bios_notebook

This exploit takes advantage of a Windows feature called Windows Platform Binary Table. This is essentially a method created for the purpose of enabling UEFI bioses to load extra binaries at boot time.

link to paper on WPBT:
http://feishare.com/attachments/article/298/windows-platform-binary-table.pdf

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @12:37AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @12:37AM (#222028)

    Guess what? There's very little difference between a Thinkpad and a generic Lenovo laptop these days.

    Lenovo took the Thinkpad line, leveraged it to sell junk to people who heard "Lenovo makes good computers," and then proceeded to turn the Thinkpad line into absolute trash. Meanwhile, competitors (Dell Precision/Latitude and HP Elitebook) not only caught up, but surpassed the Thinkpad's quality and repairability.

    The fact that they are now backpeddaling by bringing back trackpoint buttons and asking for user input in designing a "Retro Thinkpad" (hint: this would probably be a good article submission for someone) shows how bad the backlash has been. And when all is said and done, we STILL won't get a classic Thinkpad; the "Retro" that the designers have proposed is really an updated X301 from about five years ago, not a true return to the classic machines (4:3 displays and rollcage i.e. T60, A23p) that defined the brand.

    TL;DR -- Thinkpads are cheap consumer junk now.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @08:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @08:41AM (#222187)

    The fact that they are now backpeddaling by bringing back trackpoint buttons and asking for user input in designing a "Retro Thinkpad" (hint: this would probably be a good article submission for someone)

    Actually, such a submission would be a dupe. [soylentnews.org]