"situation normal": OEMs looking for a way to make a quick greasy buck.
"All fked up": self-explanatory.
Not "cyber-attack": despite conspiracy theories I've heard about the Chinese government, my belief is that the intent behind this debacle was the aforementioned quick greasy buck, not backdooring users' computers for subsequent criminal or military exploitation. It's the distinction between murder and manslaughter.
It is most likely a quick greasy buck, but I would guess that many entry level criminals start by infecting binaries with adware and then spread them through download sites. I would not be surprised if a significant portion of revenue for the Russian mafia does come from adware, just because its so easy to do and has almost no risk associated with it.
This is why I suspect the police would call it a cyber-attack if they busted a ring that earned money this way. A computer security researchers might find a distinction between a trojan, a virus, and adware, which is why I wondered how much resources a anti-virus company spends on adware alone. That number would provide a good hint as to the seriousness of such malware.
The problem with this software is, sadly, not that it was adware at all, but that it was adware which contained a critical security flaw that compromised the computers Lenovo was selling.
If Lenovo had sold the machines with secure adware, there'd be no real problem.
"All fked up": self-explanatory.
Not "cyber-attack": despite conspiracy theories I've heard about the Chinese government, my belief is that the intent behind this debacle was the aforementioned quick greasy buck, not backdooring users' computers for subsequent criminal or military exploitation. It's the distinction between murder and manslaughter.