Comment on Hackers can steal 2FA codes and private messages from Android phones

tidderuuf@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Normally I would agree with this perspective, but in this case the “malicious app” is just a demo. It requires no permissions to do the malicious behavior, which means that the relevant code could be included in any app and wouldn’t trigger a user approval, a permissions request or a security alert. This could be hiding in anything that you install.

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  • krooklochurm@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Man in the middle an app download or find some kind of exploit to inject the code from a website, ta da.

    I mean, obviously there’s more to it than this but.

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    • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Hmm, yes that can happen, but can it happen if you’re downloading directly from the Play store?

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      • krooklochurm@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        There are reports all the time of play store apps containing malware.

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      • reksas@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        first you download something and it has nothing malicious, then you update it later and then it has something.

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  • NihilsineNefas@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    So they’re using the same programs that the three letter agencies of the world have been using to crack phones since before touchscreens existed?

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    • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      This article doesn’t really address that. I don’t think there’s any indication that this particular vulnerability is related to nation-state hacking.

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  • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    So it could be hiding in, what would you call them…….malicious apps?

    The relevant code isn’t going to be in a non malicious app.

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    • ReginaPhalange@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Listen Mr Zuckerberg, we can improve our ad revenue immensely if we can do this one little trick to Facebook’s code…

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    • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Um, ok, and how would you know the difference?

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      • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Because if it’s doing this it’s a malicious app….

        Google also said they’ve found zero apps doing this.

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• hietsu@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Having cleaned a bunch of old folks phones in the past years this is far more common than we ”advanced” users think. It often starts with clicking an advert or some spam mail or message from (infected) friend, which to them, looks absolutely legit. Then the installed app spams the user with notifications to install more ”PDF readers”, ”phone cleanup apps” and whatnot. In best case these just flood the user with ads but just as easily can do more malicious stuff.

  After some schooling (”never click anything that is offered to you” etc.) and putting up defencew like AdGuard (system level) the instances of ”my phone is slow”, ”what does this message mean” etc. have radically decreased. Apple devices have their own issues but this kind of troubles are next to non-existent there.

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