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Secret Backdoor in Some US Phones Sent Data To China (nytimes.com)
Security contractors have warned that many Android smartphones ship with preinstalled software that has a backdoor that sends all your text messages to China every 72 hours. (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; here's the press release.) The New York Times reported Tuesday that "the American authorities say it is not clear whether this represents secretive data mining for advertising purposes or a Chinese government effort to collect intelligence." From the report: International customers and users of disposable or prepaid phones are the people most affected by the software. But the scope is unclear. The Chinese company that wrote the software, Shanghai Adups Technology Company, says its code runs on more than 700 million phones, cars and other smart devices. One American phone manufacturer, BLU Products, said that 120,000 of its phones had been affected and that it had updated the software to eliminate the feature. Kryptowire, the security firm that discovered the vulnerability, said the Adups software transmitted the full contents of text messages, contact lists, call logs, location information and other data to a Chinese server. The code comes preinstalled on phones and the surveillance is not disclosed to users, said Tom Karygiannis, a vice president of Kryptowire, which is based in Fairfax, Va. "Even if you wanted to, you wouldn't have known about it," he said.
Why not both?
Is there some magical thing that says if something is collecting for advertisement purposes it can't be shared with intelligence agencies?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
No reason to be alarmed. Clearly this is just a testing and debugging feature introduced by some errant developer that's been accidentally left in the release build firmware. It will be patched and fixed and you can all go back to buying these phones in safety. No way the Chinese government would have deliberately done this.
This is like Windows XP. What a cluster!
The really disturbing thing isn't that some shit Chinese handsets are full of spyware; but that our own technology industry is so overrun with advertisers, tracking, and 'analytics', that we can't distinguish between espionage and the Chinese just catching up with our business models; because the only real difference is that espionage tends to run at a loss, while advertising is economically self sustaining.
I am willing to bet that this code was originally meant to monitor Chinese users and was either put in by a Chinese agent without the companies knowledge or forded to be put in by the Chinese government. I would be willing to think that someone forgot to take it out, or someone said lets try this, but for the Chinese government to do something so obvious...I do now know.
Oh, it was just a feature. Whew! What a relief. For a second there, I thought it might be malware.
I'm going to send texts saying I'm eating Japanese food on a more regular basis now.
Hey honey, look at this Japanese sweet and sour chicken I'm eating. I feel like going to the Japanese restaurant for General Tsao's chicken tonight.
- that oughta piss 'em off.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
From the press release, the affected phones have the following services installed:
com.adups.fota.sysoper
com.adups.fota
I'd probably check your phone to ensure those don't exist. ... And it sends data to the following domains, if ya wanted to firewall or sniff it or whatever:
bigdata.adups.com (primary)
bigdata.adsunflower.com
bigdata.adfuture.cn
bigdata.advmob.cn
In Soviet America, Chinese chairman spies you!
It's called root. You enable root, then choose from any of the many apps which mount the "rom" read-write and you check off which pre-installed apps you want to remove.
India is West of Japan
love is just extroverted narcissism