Comment on Thousands of Android TV devices come with unkillable backdoor preinstalled
planish@sh.itjust.works 1 year agoAren’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.
9point6@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s the problem, they’re not running Android TV at all. Just regular phone Android with some third party launcher.
planish@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
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?
9point6@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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