Huawei Hacked My Laptop

#1

Post by realguybrush » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:03 PM UTC

Huawei Hacked My Laptop
sunburnt.com.au

Re: Huawei Hacked My Laptop

#2

Post by FDSGSG » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

Less than ideal behavior, but this bit is nonsense:

>This command makes your Linux desktop remotely accessible to anyone on the network

It's definitely not a common configuration to have X11 listening for network connections.

In a multiuser environment this could actually be a problem, but I doubt there are many multiuser environments running this driver.

On a single user machine like a laptop, this really doesn't matter at all. Yes, a process running as another user could mess with your X11 session. But if you get compromised somehow that process will almost certainly be running as your current user or root.

Re: Huawei Hacked My Laptop

#3

Post by someperson » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 2:00 PM UTC

Did inserting the Huawei E353 dongle attach a virtual CD-ROM drive that you manually installed drivers from? I know for a fact similar devices (eg, ZTE MF910) offer drivers this way. In my experience with such devices, the USB drivers that are built into Linux works fine (just like Android USB tethering), so there isn't any need to run the Huawei or ZTE driver installation.

It's worth mentioning these USB On-The-Go devices (including Android phones and 4G modems) have relatively powerful processors and run a wide variety of network services, including a web server that will never receive security patches (for the end-user web configuration interface), have your high-precision location information. The devices have a high bandwidth internet side-channel (the 4G connection itself) while also having the ability to act as any USB client device (including keyboards to send keystrokes to your computer to eg, open a command prompt and run software).

They are incredibly powerful platforms for targeted cyberattacks and I imagine state actors are using them very often.

Re: Huawei Hacked My Laptop

#4

Post by blue52 » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 2:00 PM UTC

Wow. All he did was install USB drivers and bam!

I would expect it from Huawei, but not exclusive to them.

Re: Huawei Hacked My Laptop

#5

Post by bzb3 » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 2:02 PM UTC

Yeah, a lazy developer introducing a dirty hack is state-sponsored hacking. Give me a break...

Re: Huawei Hacked My Laptop

#6

Post by gbraad » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 2:02 PM UTC

Where does this "Hauwei Autorun" come from? The findings you show could have been made by anything/anyone

Re: Huawei Hacked My Laptop

#7

Post by sova » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

gbraad wrote: post #6

Where does this "Hauwei Autorun" come from? The findings you show could have been made by anything/anyone

the first sentence says it came with a USB stick

Re: Huawei Hacked My Laptop

#8

Post by Barrin92 » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

some quick googling suggests that "autorun" appears to be some sort of usb wifi dongle driver or something, not "state sponsored hacking". Talk about jumping to conclusions

Re: Huawei Hacked My Laptop

#9

Post by znpy » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

bzb3 wrote: post #5

Yeah, a lazy developer introducing a dirty hack is state-sponsored hacking. Give me a break...

Considering China is a communist dictatorship, the company is the state, in a way.

Now my biggest guess is that xhost + is being used to allow a process running as root to launch a window into the existing xserver no matter what (probably a graphical client).

It's a very bad practice though. How comes that devices can autorun software nowadays?

Re: Huawei Hacked My Laptop

#10

Post by barrkel » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

Would this be done to permit a driver to create windows on the desktop from some place where it couldn't use :0 like normal? E.g. it can't use a Unix socket and needs to use TCP?

I'm very inexpert with X11, but have run remote apps on a local X11 server. But are there any scenarios locally (e.g. chroot) that could be blocking the Unix socket approach for a driver?