this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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Thousands of Android TV devices come with unkillable backdoor preinstalled (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's the problem, they're not running Android TV at all. Just regular phone Android with some third party launcher.

[–] planish 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure why, but for whatever reason these boxes are always running a pretty old version of regular Android. (Edit: in fact googling a couple of the devices in the article seems to confirm that)

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