Lenovo IdeaPad and IdeaCenter Sandy Bridge Recall

From:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-76673

As stated, the following hardware may be affected:

• IdeaPad laptop B570, G470, G570, V470, Y460P, Y560P
• IdeaCentre desktop K330

If you own a model as above, I suggest you contact Lenovo and see if a replacement for your motherboard is required. It is most likely required if you have SATA and you had your machine before 1 Feb 2011.

Yet another way to break a Lenovo

Lenovo laptop and desktop may install a special driver (know as hot key driver) for controlling and using the special function keys (especially on the laptop). We all know that these are the things most people will never patch, unless you had been following and using the ThinkVantage System Update which I mentioned before in my blog:

http://nemesisv.blogspot.com/2009/03/lenovo-thinkvantage-system-update.html

However, if the target happens to be one of those unpatched one (usually corp laptops), then this is your lucky day. Apparently, the way this program is structure doesn't care too much for security. It relies on a flag in the registry to tell it what to run and this is conveniently available even prior to login. Yes, you probably guessed it, its as simple as changing it to run "cmd.exe" and you have a system shell. Cool? Yes, but you need to somehow still be able to press the buttons, which probably require some social engineering trick if you are attacking a laptop which you do not have physical access to. Otherwise, its just that and you have a system shell which allows you to create havoc and extract information (such as NTLM hashes). The best of all these is none of the known anti malware will actually prevent or even flag changing of the registry as dangerous. 

Now, we all know other brands of computer have hot keys too... Think about it...

Below is the original exploit from packet storm:
http://packetstormsecurity.org/1003-exploits/lenovo-escalate.txt

 

Lenovo release System Update 4.0 for Windows 7.0

From:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/TVSU-UPDATE.html

Lenovo has release a new version of System Update for Windows 7. As you recalled, System Update is used to update Lenovo laptops and desktops. It serve as a type of Windows Update alike one stop update for drivers and other application features of the Lenovo. Using System Update, this allow the user to update all their Lenovo drivers, applications such as presentor, hotkey configurators etc.

Lenovo System Update was previously mentioned here:
http://nemesisv.blogspot.com/2009/03/lenovo-thinkvantage-system-update.html