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Comment by buckle8017

9 hours ago

Head units can log location, navigation start and end points, call logs, call audio, and scrape full contact lists.

Just off the top of my head.

That's scary from a user perspective, but harder to monetise at scale as an attacker. Proxy endpoints are just another commodity (and offer recurring revenue).

  • If you infect tens of vehicles that's not that valuable. But if you infect ten thousand vehicles, convinced a trusted member of one of the bigger black hat forums it's real and have him vouch for your marketplace post, there should be some buyers for full movement profiles, call logs and address books of ten thousand people

    And doing that doesn't really interfere with also setting up and selling proxy endpoints

  • Yeah, especially since most of these are already available for purchase from data brokers.

    • They're called data brokers because they have a buy side, too. That might be peanuts to you, but to an AliExpress seller, it could be most of their profit.

Some head units (working with a 1st party one atm) have two networks: OEM-paid (unlimited data) and user-paid. A 3rd party apk would be consuming all bought traffic quite soon.

Also typical Android permissions still apply. The user would need to grant the malicious app contacts, call logs, etc permissions.