Superfish

Superfish was an advertising company that developed various advertising-supported software products based on a visual search engine. The company was based in Palo Alto, California. It was founded in Israel in 2006 and has been regarded as part of the country's "Download Valley" cluster of adware companies. Superfish's software has been described as malware or adware by many sources. The software was bundled with various applications as early as 2010, and Lenovo began to bundle the software with some of its computers in September 2014. On February 20, 2015, the United States Department of Homeland Security advised uninstalling it and its associated root certificate, because they make computers vulnerable to serious cyberattacks, including interception of passwords and sensitive data being transmitted through browsers.

Superfish was founded in 2006 by Adi Pinhas and Michael Chertok. Pinhas is a graduate of Tel Aviv University. In 1999, he co-founded Vigilant Technology, which “invented digital video recording for the surveillance market”, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before that, he worked at Verint, an intelligence company that analyzed telephone signals and had allegedly tapped Verizon communication lines. Chertok is a graduate of Technion and Bar-Ilan University with 10 years of experience in "large scale real-time data mining systems."

Since its founding, Superfish has used a team of "a dozen or so PhDs" primarily to develop algorithms for the comparison and matching of images. It released its first product, WindowShopper, in 2011. WindowShopper immediately prompted a large number of complaints on internet message boards, from users who didn't know how the software had been installed on their machines.