Comment by pigggg
14 hours ago
Isn't this because of the kimwolf (and now 6+ other botnets) that are taking advantage of people running residential proxyware unknowingly on the device which permits outbound connections to 127.0.0.1 on tcp/5555 to auth in and exec wgets or drops a loader that grabs the ddos malware APKs and install it?
It seems to require the user to:
1. Enable Developer Mode by going to an obscure settings page and tapping the build number seven times
2. Enable USB ADB debugging in the Developer Options
3. Establish an actual USB ADB session
4. Enable TCP/IP ADB debugging in the Developer Options
5. Unknowingly download a malware app from the official Play Store
6. Blindly click "Yes" on the permission prompt.
In other words: this is all but impossible to impact regular users, and it requires a particularly careless developer to be hit by it. And it only works if the Play Store is useless at preventing malware in the first place - but I thought their excellent app scanning was the entire reasoning behind all-but-banning 3rd-party app stores and sideloading???
It is "for safety" in the same sense that governments banning all encryption is to "protect the children" or to "prevent terrorism": flawed justification invented to distract from the real reason they want it.
I think expert users on HN seriously downplay the ability and willingness of "regular users" to do very stupid things on their devices. If grandma wants that app that gives her a beautiful horse as a lock screen image, she will follow every one of those six steps that the malware HorseLockScreen app developer presents to her. She will tap a button that has a skull and crossbones icon, that says "tapping this will drain your bank account and kill your dog" if she thinks it will let her do whatever she's trying to do on her device. Have you guys never done IT tech support for your elderly parents' computers?
I'm not saying it's right to respond by simply locking everything down, but let's not downplay the blast radius of basically every attack that involves telling the user to do things.
A long time ago, I fixed Windows machines for pocket change. I can confirm some users will make bad decisions no matter what warnings they're given.
I think the impulse for an OS vendor to try to make such mistakes impossible is about as wrong as selling knives dull so people can't hurt themselves. A knife that can't cut its user is useless as a knife.
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> Have you guys never done IT tech support for your elderly parents' computers?
This kind of comment is frequently made on HN and elsewhere. However, more than a few "elderly parents" are as computer-sophisticated as their grown children. A safe bet it's not rare to be exchanging ideas with an elderly person sophisticated enough to make comments on HN.
AFAIK there's no shortage of careless, uninformed, non-elderly individuals who get scammed into doing stupid things. Age is only one possible factor out of many contributing to scam vulnerability. And let us not forget that youthful, well-trained professional IT workers, developers and software engineers are not immune to scams via misunderstanding elements of the systems or processes they supervise.
"Ageism" is a word as ugly as what it signifies.
If the users' willingness to do stupid things is boundless, then locking down the system further isn't really of any benefit, since users will continue to venture as far as they need to, no matter the number of safety barriers they've passed. The only solution to that problem is a fully locked down device (which I hope we can all agree should not be the only option).
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Well the messaging we’re told is that the google play store exists for safety - such an app would never exist on there.
Of course this isn’t true, the play store, and yes even the apple App Store to a lesser extent, is riddled with malware.
But what this demonstrates is that, clearly, Google doesn’t care too much about security or safety. It’s a pretense, not a goal. If it was a goal, they’d dump money into fixing the play store, but they won’t and they don’t.
So, we should be highly skeptical when they say something is for “safety” and “security”. At this point, it’s a lot like saying something is for “national security”.
On multiple occasions I had trouble getting people to accept a self signed cert to show them something on a local webpage. It seems that elderly nowadays are super vary of any hacking or scams. YMMV.
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> let's not downplay the blast radius of basically every attack that involves telling the user to do things.
That radius would be negligible should the things that must remain secret remain offline.
But no, that's a luddite thing to even think about in an all-connected ever-online world where even wiping one's ass is done via of a swarm of dedicated apps.
On the other hand, there has always been a way to extract secrets from a granny via a mere voice call, so no amount of dumbing it down would really help.
This gave me a hearty laugh not only due to the idea, but because that's been my near exact experience with helping my family.
> In other words: this is all but impossible to impact regular users, and it requires a particularly careless developer to be hit by it.
Have you ever worked with someone who barely knows how to use a mobile phone? They will hand their phone over to someone they barely even know to do something they don't understand. They will follow instructions from a stranger over the phone, without understanding what the phone is warning them about.
I have worked with such a person. They did have someone walk them through a dubious process. Thankfully they realized what was going on before the process was complete, but who knows how much damage was done by the initial steps.
There are legitimate security reasons here. Whether there are reasons beyond that is an open question.
Following this logic, shouldn't we just ban smart phones for everyone then? If we need to dumb down all technology to the absolute lowest level, we should probably ban computers or at least require an official government-controlled license to get access to one. Is this a world you want to live in? Me neither.
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A lot of people are misconstruing what I have said, which is pointing out that this can impact regular users. It not intended as a justification to restrict on-device ADB, and it certainly isn't meant to justify more extreme measures. That being said, we should not ignore what happens in the real world since the consequences are real.
Can we freaking sell them dumbphones, then, and stop destroying portable computers for everyone else with that excuse?
Which incidentally is often just a pretense for other motives?
If computers have suddenly become so dangerous for normal people, and they want smartphones nonetheless, add to them a dumb-mode encouraged at the initial setup, and requiring some third party assistance to turn it off once enabled..! (and forbid apps to change their behavior if it's not enabled)
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You are right, better locking them out of the Play Store, there's too much risk using it.
We could also imagine a 24h delay to get Play Store access with a modal to make them understand the risks.
Those people will be conned in a million other ways.
You haven't been able to connect to an android device on port 5555 for yeeears. Every time you enable adb/IP it generates a new random port, or you need to use the QR/PIN pairing thing. On top of needing to enable developer options, adb/IP, confirm the fingerprint.
Millions of Superboxes and various digital picture frames say different.
https://synthient.com/blog/a-broken-system-fueling-botnets
Kimwolf exploits vulnerable Android Debug Bridge (ADB) services. Many low-cost TV boxes come "pre-infected" with proxy SDKs; Kimwolf then scans these residential proxy networks and exploits the devices within minutes as it propagates.
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/glossary/aisuru-kim...
This is like saying that SSH is insecure because some device vendors install SSH, permitting root login with a default password of 'root'.
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Well yes, but those won't get Google's new updates either. Open ADB on 5555 was a problem we solved almost a decade ago and these devices are still vulnerable. Even further restricting ADB in the latest version won't do anything to prevent that.
Hadn't thought about that additional attack vector those proxies are enabling. In addition to "internet access from residental connection" privileges, the attacker also gets access to loopback on the device that does the proxying...
But even then, shouldn't this show the same permission prompt for the user that anything else trying to connect to port 5555 would?
Yes, but users are told to allow it if they want to get free coins etc.
You can't fully protect people from the risk of taking bad advice from malicious strangers.
Not the least because most of our industry relies on it to make money. Marketing and advertising themselves are institutionalized forms of "do this thing that's actually harmful to you to get free coins / be safe / get laid".
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Told by whom though? If it's through proxyware, then there are three parties who mostly don't know each other:
- the app embedding the proxyware SDK for money
- the proxy operators
- the attackers/botnets using the proxy to access ADB.
The botnet has no access to the app, so it can't show any messages.
The app can show messages, but probably has no connection to the botnet. (I hope)
The proxy operators could show a message by abusing the SDK even more, but that would mean they actively colluded with the botnet. Is that likely? Then they could just give the botnet direct access to the app, no need to do the whole proxy thing.
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From memory, for the kimwolf exploit things, other user already had good points about the device already beeing compromised. But also, the authentification part of ADB was just completly disabled, which is why this worked. Basically it was so-compromised as-is that ADB was just sitting here open, as is you where to put SSH with no authentification at all.
There are so many people in my neighborhood here that are actively members of residential proxy networks that it makes me stabby. They don't seem to care.
That said, I wasn't under the impression kimwolf was that technically sophisticated. Some of the others are, though.