Thousands of Android devices come with unkillable backdoor preinstalled

https://lemmy.world/post/6465002

Thousands of Android devices come with unkillable backdoor preinstalled - Lemmy.world

“In total the researchers confirmed eight devices with backdoors installed—seven TV boxes, the T95, T95Z, T95MAX, X88, Q9, X12PLUS, and MXQ Pro 5G, and a tablet J5-W. (Some of these have also been identified by other security researchers looking into the issue in recent months).”

This is the best summary I could come up with:

This week, cybersecurity firm Human Security is revealing new details about the scope of the infected devices and the hidden, interconnected web of fraud schemes linked to the streaming boxes.

“They’re like a Swiss Army knife of doing bad things on the Internet,” says Gavin Reid, the CISO at Human Security who leads the company’s Satori Threat Intelligence and Research team.

“This is a truly distributed way of doing fraud.” Reid says the company has shared details of facilities where the devices may have been manufactured with law enforcement agencies.

In the second half of 2022, Human Security says in its report, its researchers spotted an Android app that appeared to be linked to inauthentic traffic and connected to the domain flyermobi.com.

When Milisic posted his initial findings about the T95 Android box in January, the research also pointed to the flyermobi domain.

The company’s report, which has data scientist Marion Habiby as its lead author, says Human Security spotted at least 74,000 Android devices showing signs of a Badbox infection around the world—including some in schools across the US.

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Clarifying “Android” here feels misleading. Sure, they’re all Android devices, but they’re not what people think of when they think of Android devices. And they’re also unlikely to be the ones most people buy.

You could also say “cheap Chinese TV boxes” and it’d still be accurate, and the devices people would think of would be more closely related to the actual devices in question.

This has basically nothing to do with Android. You might as well say “plastic TV boxes” at that point.

agreed! what a pointless inclusion of Android in the headline. clearly trying to paint a bad picture for them
Thats what the title was for the last couple posts for this article, "cheap android TV boxes" instead android itself.
Why did this headline say “AND Apple”?
Because there are some iOS apps implicated, I assume. It’s definitely misleading, if you buy one of the tv boxes they talk about in the article you are almost certainly getting malware, if you buy an appletv even used, the chance it has malware that would survive a clean reinstall is minuscule.