Side note: I didn't notice the page was translated from another language until after I finished reading it and noticed the title bar. Machine translation between European languages has really come a long way.
Nokia phones sent identifiable data to Chinese server
51–60 of 191 posts
Re: Nokia phones sent identifiable data to Chinese server
#52Re: Nokia phones sent identifiable data to Chinese server
#53I knew of that 9 months ago, but nobody was interested so I dropped it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17329825
I have a work device that is a Nokia 8. I see the evenwell apps too.
Were you able to forcefully uninstall these via adb?
Re: Nokia phones sent identifiable data to Chinese server
#54ALL Android phones users should go NOW and instal NoRoot Firewall. This will catch anything running over the OS (but I feel it wouldn't catch any rootkit). What information is missing in the article is "which app is leaking the data"? On all rooted android phones you can advise on uninstall xyz and be done with it. Then you can take screenshots and make a nice post in your blog. Unfortunately I don't own a Nokia 7 to do this myself.
Re: Nokia phones sent identifiable data to Chinese server
#55Please don't assume this is a one-time event, or that it is specific to this brand or even to Chinese manufacturers.
Nokia could actually be in the best half on that aspect, just got unlucky.
Most of such info leaks are hidden. I've already witnessed several OEM firmwares sending informations to many different parties. Too often, this is done through http, with payload encrypted. But it's always symmetrical encryption, and the encryption key can be computed from the fields in clear in the request. Such techniques are enough to stay under the radar of classic MITM, and require hard reverse engineering work to detect. I've noticed such behaviours on major Chinese OEMs, and white-label brands.
I never did actual reverse engineering on more western-ish brands, but the little I've seen doesn't look good. On Samsung Galaxy S9+ simply listing apps that can install apps silently (which is the master of all permissions, because this gives the right to give apps any permission), raises an advertisement company in Israel and a Telco in Singapore.
If you're worried about this situation (I do), I recommend you start lobbying about mandatory bootloader unlock, and easier OS replacement on smartphones. In this area, Nokia is amongst the worse, since AFAIK they still haven't authorized any bootloader unlock. Personally my work in this ecosystem is to make the Phh-Treble ROM, which is most likely the Android ROM with the largest hardware support (even though it requires the phone to be natively running Android 8 at least), and it is opensource.
Re: Nokia phones sent identifiable data to Chinese server
#56It is kind of ironic for me to think my perception of Android as same as Windows as major malware distributor despite it is based on Linux. Android is now fast becoming Windows XP of mobile.
My Android phone came with a weather app preinstalled. The app cannot be uninstalled, is full of translation errors and some links redirect to Chinese websites. Who knows what data my phone constantly sends there? Adding to that the fact that I don't receive system updates anymore, I have absolutely no trust in my phone. My next phone will be an iPhone, for the lack of better alternative.
Yeah, I recently switched from iPhone to Samsung Galaxy S10.
I don't have a previous experience so my reasoning was "well it's Samsung, at worst they'll have some shitty branded apps and some cruft". But I don't have an idea what these dozens of preinstalled apps running on my phone doing. Almost none of them can be uninstalled and only a handful can be disabled.
It is kind of scary to use a banking app on this thing. Never felt this way on an iPhone. I wanted to see the Android side after years of iPhone use, apparently it is still shit.
Re: Nokia phones sent identifiable data to Chinese server
#57Re: Nokia phones sent identifiable data to Chinese server
#58Re: Nokia phones sent identifiable data to Chinese server
#59Allegedly hacked entire OPM database, Marriot and other orgs. This allows them to potentially blackmail key personnel they want to control. Imagine what they can accomplish with the deployment of Huawei 5G.
Re: Nokia phones sent identifiable data to Chinese server
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Happens with a lot of posts, if they don't reach a critical mass of upvotes early on. In this case probably nobody could verify, if the claims were correct.
Maybe we should add a new topline category, "threat reports"?
This seems outside of HN remit, but definitely worth being a site of its own with an RSS feed. I feel this should be curated not based on community voting.