Farcaster

9 years ago this month I discovered the Lenovo superfish virus and worked with Nicole Perlroth at the New York Times to get the story out. 

AMA.

Tradfi coder by day, hacker by night. Doesn’t know night from day. Freelance scribe. Dad cook. Dog butler.  Happy Grandpa. Draws badly.

What were you doing at the time that led to you discovering it?

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I was watching TV sitting with the fam quietly setting up a new Lenovo notepad for mobile dev and I ran a build that failed with an auto regression test that had never failed before.

It was funny (to me). I worked out how to detect it and I was going OS.  So I got photos of it on PCs in stores in Sydney, Perth, NYC and Boston.  Reached out through my network and got a referral to NYC, and I was on the Acela to Boston and we did it over the phone for the next day.

Wow and how long elapsed between that initial error and the discovery? Was it hours, days, weeks?