Comment on Thousands of Android TV devices come with unkillable backdoor preinstalled
9point6@lemmy.world 8 months agoI guess the problem is that “Android TV” is a specific thing that none of these devices actually are, they’re just dodgy boxes running Android that can be plugged into a TV.
For me it’s more clickbaity because Android TV isn’t actually involved here at all.
Aren’t the boxes running “Android TV”, the set top box oriented flavor of Android, with e.g. the launcher designed to be operated with a TV remote and not a touch screen?
They are not themselves TVs, though, and I guess nowdays it might be most common for “Android TV” to run on the TV instead of on a separate device.
That’s the problem, they’re not running Android TV at all. Just regular phone Android with some third party launcher.
Are you sure? One can definitely build images of the actual “Android TV” for various SBCs and the sorts of SOCs in these TV boxes, and then load them up with malware. Why wouldn’t they use that?
Honestly, I’m not entirely sure why, but for whatever reason these boxes are always running a pretty old version of Android.
Maybe there are more protections preventing this kind of malware on newer versions? Maybe someone just made the images a long time ago and people are just reusing them
kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
I’d say it would be more clickbaity if you just removed the “TV”, because it’d make you think of smartphones, and those would be much more concerning
9point6@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yeah I’m not sure what the correct headline is, but at least for me I definitely clicked because I thought it was to do with Android TV, which it wasn’t.