Superfish scare: If you use Lenovo laptop, keep calm and follow these steps to stop hackers

All laptop makers install unwanted programs on their laptops. But Lenovo has apparently crossed the limit. It started pre-installing Superfish -- the company claims in good faith -- to its laptops in late 2014. However, there were reports that Superfish was not exactly what it seemed. Lenovo claimed that it helped users by giving them relevant product search results, read advertisement. But in reality the program was doing something more.

Now the reports have come in that Superfish was doing something really really nasty. And in doing so, and this is important, it was exposing Lenovo laptop users to private data theft and hacking.

So as a Lenovo laptop user what should you do? This Superfish incident is serious and you should be worried about it. But thankfully, given the nature of Windows, it can be dealt with successfully.

But before we talk about how to get rid of Superfish, keep in mind:

-- Lenovo says that only IdeaPad laptops are affected. ThinkPad laptops are fine.

-- Lenovo says that only the laptops sold in the last few months of 2014 are affected. It stopped pre-installing Superfish in January this year.

-- This also means if you have an old Lenovo laptop -- older than one year -- it is not affected by the Superfish.

Now, let's talk about what we can do to deal with Superfish. Follow these steps:

-- Check if your machine is affected or not by clicking on https://filippo.io/Badfish/

-- If the machine is affected in Windows 8, click on search button and type "remove programs"

-- From the search results, select "Add or remove programs"

-- In the list of installed programs, look for Superfish Inc, VisualDiscovery

-- Uninstall the program

-- Go to C Drive > Programs > Delete the folders files associated with Superfish

-- Remove Superfish security certificates (very important)

-- To remove certificates, in Windows search "certificates"

-- Click "Manage Computer certificates"

-- From the list, select Superfish. Right click on it and then delete the certificate

-- Go to https://filippo.io/Badfish/ and check again whether your machine is free of the Superfish or not.

You can also see the instructions to remove Superfish in this guide posted by Lenovo .