Lenovo installed a piece of software that could arguably be called malware or spyware. Superfish, as this article indicates, installs a self-signed root certificate that is authoritative for everything. I wanted to be sure that this issue wasn’t present on any of our Lenovo systems, so I turned to PowerShell to help.

I found a copy of the certificate on Robert David Graham’s github here. I pulled the thumbprint from the cert which appears to be: ‎c864484869d41d2b0d32319c5a62f9315aaf2cbd

Now, some simple PowerShell code will let you run through your local certificate store and see if you have it installed.

Get-ChildItem -Recurse cert:\LocalMachine\ |where {$_.Thumbprint -eq "c864484869d41d2b0d32319c5a62f9315aaf2cbd"}

You could just as easily replace the get-childitem with “Remove-Item -Path cert:\LocalMachine\root\c864484869d41d2b0d32319c5a62f9315aaf2cbd”, but I wanted to make sure the key wasn’t installed somewhere else.

Now, to take it a step further, I use the AD commandlets and some more simple PowerShell to search all my systems for it.

Import-Module ActiveDirectory
$Cred = Get-Credential
$Computers = Get-ADComputer -Filter {enabled -eq $true} | select Name
foreach ($Computer in $Computers) {
 try{
 if(test-connection -Count 1 -ComputerName $Computer.Name){
 write-output (invoke-command -ComputerName $Computer.Name -Credential $Cred -ScriptBlock {Get-ChildItem -Recurse cert:\LocalMachine\ |where {$_.Thumbprint -eq "‎c864484869d41d2b0d32319c5a62f9315aaf2cbd"}})
 }
 }catch{
 Write-Error ("There was an issue connecting to computer $Computer : " + $_.Exception)
 }
}

Is it perfect? No. But it gets the job done in relatively short order.