Manually Reinstalling the Lenovo Solution Center - Closing a Back Door for Malware

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.

1. Search for Support

With some difficulty, I found the Lenovo support website at

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en

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.

2. 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!

3. 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;

4. 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;

https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/ca/en/product_security/PS500024

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.

5. 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. :-)