this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
226 points (93.8% liked)
Technology
76440 readers
3892 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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?
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.
first you download something and it has nothing malicious, then you update it later and then it has something.
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.
Having cleaned a bunch of old folks phones in the past years this is far more common than we ”advanced” users think. It often starts with clicking an advert or some spam mail or message from (infected) friend, which to them, looks absolutely legit. Then the installed app spams the user with notifications to install more ”PDF readers”, ”phone cleanup apps” and whatnot. In best case these just flood the user with ads but just as easily can do more malicious stuff.
After some schooling (”never click anything that is offered to you” etc.) and putting up defencew like AdGuard (system level) the instances of ”my phone is slow”, ”what does this message mean” etc. have radically decreased. Apple devices have their own issues but this kind of troubles are next to non-existent there.