Manually Reinstalling The Lenovo
Solution Center – A Back Door for Malware
The Lenovo Solution Center is an
application that comes installed on most Lenovo Laptops, including my
Lenovo E440 Thinkpad. Its functions include Hardware Scan, Driver
Updates, and System Info. I didn't use it very much.
One day, after a Critical Windows 7
Update, I clicked the Lenovo Solution Center icon only to find a red
box warning-- Something like, “The Lenovo Solution Center Hardware
Scan has been corrupted-- Please Reinstall Lenovo Solution Center by
clicking here.”
When I “Clicked Here,” I got
another message telling me that the Lenovo Solution Center would have
to be manually reinstalled.
- Search for Support
With some difficulty, I found the
Lenovo support website at
The site wants you to search for
support by entering your product number, serial number and other
information. If you had a working Lenovo Solution Center, you could
find this information easily. Alas! A conundrum, similar to when
your Windows modem driver does not work, and the windows
troubleshooter tells you to download a new driver from the internet.
Fortunately, you can click on the
phrase in blue, “Help me find my product and
serial number” which will extract the statistics of your
computer. It will do this if you have already installed the Lenovo
Service Bridge Program. Which I hadn't done.
- Install the Lenovo Service Bridge Program
Clicking through the blue phrase gives
you the option to download and install the Lenovo Service Bridge
Program. Because my Lenovo screen is small, I had to scroll down to
the [I Agree] button to agree to the terms of their services.
Eventually, it allows you to click [Detect My Product].
The details of your laptop are loaded
to the Lenovo website. NOW you are ready to ask your question!
- Reinstall Lenovo Solution Center
When your product information
populates, you can use this phrase to search for the link to download
the LSC installer package. The closest link I found was this;
“Driver Lenovo Solution Center for
Windows 10 / 8.1 / 8 / 7 (32-bit) Desktops, Notebooks, Workstations
with this link embedded;
https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/ca/en/downloads/DS104494
If you happen to have a 32-bit system
that matches the description, this is the file you want.
Unfortunately, my system is a 64-bit system. None of the links gave
me the 64-bit driver.
After searching through the service
bulletins for 90 minutes I found a bulletin with a link that told me
the rest of the story;
- Privilege Escalation Vulnerabilities Within Lenovo Solution Center LEN-4326
This link describes a back door in the
Lenovo Solution Center that allows hackers to execute malicious code
through it;
And – Finally!-- It also provides a
link to the Lenovo Solution Center installer for 64-bit systems, like
mine. You may be able to search for the program name directly, but
probably less risky to find it through the Lenovo Support website.
Here's the program name;
lscsetup_x64_36002.exe
Download and install that, and the back
door (at least, this particular one) should be fixed.
- Customer Support Note-- On the difficulty of providing helpful feedback to manufacturers
After I figured all this out, I thought
I would send an email to Lenovo to let them know how difficult it was
for me to find the 64-bit file on their website.
“Maybe,” I thought, “they could
allow the 64-bit installation app to be found in steps 1 thru 3
above.” No such luck. It does not seem to be possible to contact
Lenovo at all by clicking the “Contact Us” link on their website.
This is probably because my service contract has expired. It does
seem unreasonable to me that I would have to pay additional money to
Lenovo in order to provide them and their other customers with a
solution to one of their problems. So I am putting it on my blog
instead. :-)
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