The CTO also claimed that the preinstalled software would be appreciated by users ;-). So better take his words with a grain of salt. ❝In general, we get prett

The CTO also claimed that the preinstalled software would be appreciated by users ;-). So better take his words with a grain of salt. ❝In general, we get pretty good feedback from users on what software we pre-install on computers.❞ And yes, I'm pretty sure that security in third party software is at most an afterthought. Security holes hardly every are as blatant as the one created here, and my guess is that the normal process is to "just get an update from the vendor, should any security holes become apparent." With the constant change of bundled software, do you really think that a thorough security review takes place? I'm very sure that this will only be done on the utilities, tools and drivers that are built to operate on a much broader range of devices (e.g. the ugly "battery icon" power manager blemishing most Lenovo PCs' taskbars), will also be installed by "enterprise"-customers, and generally are maintained over longer time periods. The decision on including crapware certainly is done somewhere in marketing, and then just passed on to whoever has to build the default image.