Like seriously, many of them are sold for stupid cheap prices like $5/ea. Or advertise unlimited movies/shows/etc for similarly unbelievable prices.
Putting aside the copyright infringement aspect of it, to me it's extremely obvious "wait... _why_ am I paying so little here?".
No, it's not because movies and shows are 99.9999% profit (spoiler: they aren't), it's because you're _paying_ to install a backdoor that will rip and tear everything on your network it can.
You like having a credit card? That's precious, it's mine now.
Look at me, I'm the network now.
How is this different from buying hardware and software from big market players?
Why it's not obvious to every Senator and Representative in our Government is frustrating to an extreme.
We really do need to end our enhance our trade protections one way or another.
Why? How does this impact your life enough to be that frustrating?
I mean, maybe. More likely imo you're paying for the absolute cheapest hardware and fastest never-updated software someone could throw together and make _any_ profit on. Someone probably had 100k shitty little chips sitting in a warehouse and this was a way to do something with them.
The outcome is really the same, it's just the steps to get there are more human nature.
https://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2024/11/18/tv-companies-sell...
> you just have to look at the finances of Vizio or Roku to see they’re selling TVs at somewhere between -3 and -7% margin
Fucking everyone is spying. I started downloading and decrypting apps from the App Store. It’s a god damn nightmare. Random apps are storing keys in the keychain (thanks expo!) that never leave our apple account. They follow us forever. You can’t delete them. Well.. there’s one way but it involves backing up your phone, putting it in recovery mode, and restoring from backup.
I mean, it's pretty obvious the services are paid piracy. But it's got to cost something to pull VOD movies from wherever and serve them with an http server limited at 8 mbps even for content that exceeds that. Obviously someone doesn't want the content they stole to be easy to steal... too bad you can't reasonably play it either. :P
I'm confused. I intentionally use ADB over the network sometimes, and I have to explicitly interactively allow each adb client by its key. Are they shipping boxes with adb configured to just allow any connection without any verification?
It must be crowded on these devices by now - it may be a bit misleading to think of it as a single botnet when there are multiple unrelated entities controlling the same devices via the same methods.
nmap -Pn 192.168.0.0/16 -p 5555
Now that it's publicly known I guess it's possible that they will close the door post-infection to avoid detecton. And it won't detect any other devices it's spread further to.
If you have a cheapo Android-based TV box or stick like the ones mentioned, throw it out or reflash it with Armbian after forensics.
I'm sure there are HN readers out there who have one of these. They were very popular a couple of years back.
Have not tested it myself ymmv.
[0] https://synthient.com/blog/a-broken-system-fueling-botnets
https://blog.xlab.qianxin.com/kimwolf-botnet-en/#network-pro...
That article has a more technical lens. It focuses primarily on the size and detection evasion methods of Kimwolf, rather than some notable (and definitely not unique) method of spreading.
Without looking too deeply, I'm going to assume that this is a successful botnet because it managed to get into product supply lines at big box stores and in app store games, rather than some clever virus that is spreading across the world.
I hope someone will correct me if I am mistaken!
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As for your assumption the OP talks about how it uses residential proxies to get into lans, I don’t think it is a supply chain attack.
Some (even cheap) unmanaged switches have a "vlan" or "isolation" switch that does exactly that, where only one or two "uplink" or "wan" ports can talk to the rest. If you have a managed switch, vlans is what most people would use for isolation.
On the software side you could also assign /32 IPv4 addresses only and add explicit ip route for the router only.
You can look around for something like device isolation, but I doubt you'll find it unless you go a couple of steps up from whatever router ISPs ~give away these days.
you can however isolate with vlans and a vlan capable switch, then it would be on the router to isolate traffic between lans (I do exactly this for my less trusted virtual machines)
Just don't run code you download from the internet or put your passwords to important accounts into cheap devices and you'll be fine. Normally people don't the the former, but sometimes do the latter.
edit: To be clear: the bitterness in this comment comes from how many developers assume loopback is secure. However, most website are allowed to send requests to local ports on your computer (IIRC) so that assumption is basically completely false. This is forgivable, except in a world where every developer runs tons of extensions/scripts/open-source apps, and have next-to-zero blast-radius-reduction methods, it makes me sad.
Every time I ask this question nobody is able to give me a solid answer :/
Maybe I've just gotten lucky?
(i will say putting a device not running open source software/firmware or something very locked down like a phone on your LAN is insanity, i could never)
Oh no, let me get my tiny violin! Really hard to feel bad here. For most home users (that don’t expose anything sensitive on their LAN) these boxes are not a threat, seem to be doing a useful service in providing a superior streaming service that the balkanized official ones, and also shits on internet spammers/advertisers and frees up loginwalled content - sounds like a pretty good box really.
You can buy a better one that does not have malware installed. So these are complete and total garbage and no sane person should run them under any circumstance. Sounds like you have a bias which has prevented you from thinking about this clearly.
You can buy a better one if you have the technical know-how. But if you did you'd probably be running the *arr stack anyway and not need such a box. But these boxes do work and aren't any more of a threat than your usual public Wi-Fi for the casual user who does not expose any services to the LAN.
The alarm around them is less about the threat to its owner and more about the threat to the tech ecosystem at large... which considering how hostile it is to users, shouldn't really be something they have any reason to worry about.
Also, is there a better word than ad fraud? It needs an innocuous sounding euphemism like pretty much everything else involving that industry has. “Monetizing ad display”? “User-agent driven conversions?”