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So why aren't we hearing about someone being arrested? Google knows who their devs are. Law enforcement can demand they give up that info.
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This happened on ios for me years ago. I had two apps that radically changed their business model (owner?) through updates with no recourse. I had an app called gas cubby, which let me locally - on the phone - keep track of all my vehicles. I could enter detailed information about each car such as year, make, model, vin, insurance policy, gas purchases, oil changes and the like. It would tell you gas mileage and remi…
School tried to make me use camscanner, glad I took the extra effort to do something else. Thanks for the anecdote.
To what did you switch? Camscanner is otherwise an excellent app, especially for combining multiple images and straightening them out.
Thinking about it, Apple seems like they'd have better dealt with this sort of issue in four ways: * Stricter review process to catch this preemptively * Stricter app isolation to limit impact without a vulnerability explicit * Longer maintained and more forceful operating system updates to minimize the number of phones running with known exploits * Likely removing/disabling app from phones and not just the app store
Stuff like this happens on iOS all the time and everyone just ignores it because it's mostly sandboxed. Apple is terrible at stopping malware until it ends up in the news.
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School tried to make me use camscanner, glad I took the extra effort to do something else. Thanks for the anecdote.
I absolutely love Camscanner, and I have been for over a year on the old version because I refuse to update to the new version which requires network permissions. I exactly suspected this is why it needs those permissions. To what did you switch? Camscanner is otherwise an excellent app, especially for combining multiple images and straightening them out.
Don’t be naive, the majority will accept the money and gladly.
I believe that particularly makeshift applications such as e.g. barcode scanners are susceptible to this kind of overtake. Apps that offer what should have been offered by the OS vendor in the first place. Why should the app developer refuse the money if what their app offers will be incorporated in a next OS update by anyways? Why defend your mini-adapter-app in an ocean of mini-adapter-apps, with yours becoming so large just because of a random seed and path dependency?
This can have a big impact for end users. Imagine an authenticator app ending service to all their users in such a scheme and how you will be cut out from all your accounts by this. How many authenticator apps do you have to use in parallel to mitigate this risk of a single point of failure?
Stallman calls autoupdates a "universal backdoor".
The only reason this was detected was very overt behavior - opening AD popups. So I guesstimate for each one of these we have 10 that go undetected. This means the whole ecosystem is broken, as there is no reason this will happen only for updates and not for new apps as well. Apple's ecosystem is somewhat better, but I can't imagine they go through every line of code in each package, so most of their review is probab…
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I wonder if there's a coordinated effort to exploit barcode reader apps, because (at least where I'm from) its becoming a government mandated Covid tracing thing to use a QR code to "check in" to certain classes of businesses/venues? I bet there's a _huge_ increase in use of QR code scanning apps compared to this the last year...
Its kind of amazing that there isnt an official qr code scanner app preinstalled on phones given how ubiquitous QR codes are.
Wechat had 1.17 billion users last year and has had a QR scanner built in for many years now. Given that you need the app to login to their web or desktop applications, it can be presumed that that many users have the app installed, possibly making WeChat the most popular QR code scanner app.