How to check for and securely remove Superfish badware from your Lenovo PC

Chinese computer manufacturer Lenovo has admitted that it installed an adware component called Superfish on 16 million PCs shipped between September 2014 and February 2015 in order to "help customers potentially discover interesting products while shopping" according to an official statement made by the company. Although there is some argument to be had as to the validity of the 'helping customers' idea regarding software which injects third party adverts into Google searches and websites without the explicit permission or knowledge of the user, where there is no debate to be had at all is in the bloody great security hole Superfish drives through any Lenovo computer it is installed upon. It is true that Superfish doesn't, as far as I can tell, monitor user behaviour or record user data and instead uses contextual and image-based methods; meaning that users are not tracked as such. However, it is also true that it does some things which have the potential to be very dangerous indeed and that potential looks like it could soon become a very tangible reality.