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Smartphone Malware Planted In Popular Apps Pre-sale
An anonymous reader writes with news from The Stack that makes it a little harder to scoff at malware on phones as being largely the fruit of dodgy sideloaded software, game cracks, et cetera. They report that even phones marketed as brand new, from well-known brands like Lenovo and Xiaomi, have been tampered with and "infected prior to sale with intelligent malware disguised in popular apps such as Facebook." (To U.S. buyers, those makers may be slightly obscure as cellphone vendors; the scheme this article addresses involves handsets sold by vendors in Europe and Asia, involving more than 20 different handset types.)
How can Alphabet let that happen? Why aren't they protecting their customers better?
Are smartphones going to become like PC's such that malware scanners will have to scan them 24/7 and make them slow to crawl and use up all the battery? Some blame this on Windows' design, but it seems the more ubiquitous an OS, the more its targeted by malware makers, often by dangling tainted carrots in front of users.
Table-ized A.I.
Hey, even some well known top brands have done this.
It's still dodgy side-loaded stuff, it's just been put on by the people who sold it to you.
Which is why the owner of the phone needs to have the ability to uninstall any damned app instead of having shitware put on my the carrier or vendor be something you can't get rid of ... and why we need the ability to enforce granular permissions on everything an app wants to do.
Most apps exist to do one of two things: steal your information, or deliver ads. Which is why I have give up on any app which has a corresponding web-page.
Increasingly I just don't trust the companies who make apps, and assume they're all going to act like assholes. Usually they do.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Does Lenovo make ANYTHING anymore that isn't full of malware?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
There is only one source you can trust for technology. That source is Apple.
Sent from my Blackberry.
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Trolling is a art,
and now SLACKWARE? :PPPP
They're not even in the list of makers that I know of:
Samsung
Apple (Samsung again)
Motorola
Nokia (Microsoft)
LG
Sony
Sagem
Siemens
ZTE
Blackberry
(not exhaustive but my brain's a bit fucked right now).
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
And this is another reason that I find a "dumb" phone fits my needs. Good luck installing malware on the dinosaur-era flip-phone I use.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
there are phones out now that are more powerful than my four year old LAPTOP. What the fuck do you need to make a fucking phone call??
Smartphones are not really primarily phones. They're small tablet computers that happen to be able to make calls. The phone feature is almost incidental since 90%+ of the time they are used for other purposes. I spend maybe 1-2 hours talking on my smartphone each month and probably 20+ hours doing other stuff with it like reading news, checking email, taking pictures, etc.
They're not even in the list of makers that I know of:
That's because you probably don't live in China. They're actually a good sized player in the market. Also they are buying (have bought?) Motorola's handset operations from Google.
"The researchers suspect that the illegal software was used to collect private metadata, among other personal information stored on the device. According to the research report, in some cases the malware was reading and sending messages, installing other apps, collecting and modifying call data, gathering location details, and recording phone conversations."
Hey! That sounds like what the google does!
Malware, sure, but intelligent?
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