tl;dr It can do this because it’s a screen reader, and “the infection starts with downloading malicious Android APK files disguised as Google Chrome or Preemix Box Applications”. In short, not likely to affect users who can count to 20 without taking off their shoes.
not likely to affect users who can count to 20 without taking off their shoes
There are a surprising number of people who aren’t stupid, but never learned basic computer admin skills before getting a smartphone. There’s some debate going on over whether the onus is on the user to learn those skills or the OS vendor to make devices so appliance-like they’re not needed. I’m firmly in the former camp.
And I’m in the technology connections camp. They should learn how appliances work too!
Definitely adding “couldn’t count to 20 without taking off their shoes” to my repertoire, thank you very much
Same thought here! 😆
Curious if graphene’s exploit protection would prevent this from taking hold. There would be ways around it, but I don’t know if it could gain admin privileges.
From what I can see, this doesn’t need privilege escalation. Just for the user to grant it screen reader privileges, which many users aren’t conditioned to see as the giant flashing red alarm bell it is.
Malware is like fishing. Bait a million hooks and throw them out there, something’s gonna bite and get hooked even if 999,999 lines never even get tugged.
I wonder if this was developed in-house by or in collaboration with Google to help push all the new play store changes.
