Are Made-In-China Computers Safe?

Suzanne asked us two questions: * I just bought an HP 15t-ac100 laptop through the HP official site. It was built and shipped from China. Can HP computers from China come with spyware and viruses? * Should I continue to use Quicken 2013, or buy the 2015 version, or should I use Mint, where security feels slightly uncomfortable? Suzanne, as long as you bought your computer from HP or another reputable vendor, don’t worry about it being made in China. If you want to stay away from computer built in China you’re probably looking at a couple of Apple models and probably nothing else, pretty much every electronic is made in China these days. The bad things you might have heard about computers coming from China are likely related to the Lenovo brand, which rather famously was caught with software called “Superfish” on their laptop models back in February. Superfish was supposed to inject ads and other shopping results into your browser session when you were connected to Google, Amazon, and other sites like that. The problem was, in order to do that, Superfish had to break the security certificates so it could pretend to be that site, and in doing so it introduced a massive security vulnerability. It didn’t take long for hackers to exploit it, and Lenovo had a massive PR and technical headache on their hands. HP didn’t have Superfish on their computers, although they have plenty of other bloatware--none of it appears to be a security risk. They rather cheekily mocked Lenovo using the official HP Twitter account. So you should be fine with your new computer, but as always we advise scanning with a program like Malwarebytes that is specifically tuned to catch spyware. Certainly don’t be afraid to uninstall anything that HP preloaded, if you’re not going to use it. Quicken 2015, 2013, or Mint? Quicken and Mint are both Intuit products, so their security should be fairly comparable, think of it this way: if Ford has a safer brake design, and they own it, why not port it to all of its cars rather than installing one that stops the car 50% of the time on some of them. Quicken 2015 will not give you your credit score for free (it’s the  Equifax report and it’s updated every 90 days), it will give you more information about your investments, and it uses updated rules to maximize what you get out of social security, so it may be better for you but it largely depends on what you do with it. If you’re tracking a bank account and little more either will work. You can go through a full list of changes in Quicken 2015, some of them sound nice, most of them are modest improvements that you probably won’t notice, or care to have. If you’re considering Mint as one of your options, you’re probably ok just sticking to Quicken 2013’s features.