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.
Let me stop you right there… and leave.
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.
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.
That’s how these things work. They’re chained.
Hmm, yes that can happen, but can it happen if you’re downloading directly from the Play store?
first you download something and it has nothing malicious, then you update it later and then it has something.
There are reports all the time of play store apps containing malware.
I’m sure there are apps that have malware built in yes, but I mean the MITM approach during an app download that you were describing.
Oh.
Not sure. I was speaking in hypotheticals. I’m sure it’s possible though.
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?
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.
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.
Listen Mr Zuckerberg, we can improve our ad revenue immensely if we can do this one little trick to Facebook’s code…
Um, ok, and how would you know the difference?
Because if it’s doing this it’s a malicious app….
Google also said they’ve found zero apps doing this.
OK, how would you know?
So what? There are millions of apps on the Play store, they aren’t all being reviewed with this level of scrutiny. This means basically nothing.