As someone who knows his way around Android moderately well, what’s the danger in taking this and securing it? I wouldn’t actually do it because I’d never be able to trust it, but the basic idea of a rooted Android box sounds promising.
Way too dangerous. It’s so easy to hide an executable in all sorts of places. Unless it literally had no network (or data in general) connection, you would never know for sure. The only way I’d trust this is if I always used an external drive to play files and if I ever wanted to add more, I’d use a blank flash drive and format it right after in a VM or live boot drive each time. Even that feels too risky, though. I would never ever connect it to the internet.
Research published Monday brings the threat into much clearer view. Security firm Plume cataloged a vast ecosystem of malware that preys squarely on users of SuperBox, just one of many media players offering pirated content. These malicious apps can be surreptitiously installed by remote attackers even when the devices are positioned behind a router. While Monday’s deep-dive analysis focused exclusively on SuperBox, Plume warned that dozens of similar streaming devices pose precisely the same threat.
“Our researchers found that these residential proxy networks are not simply monetization tools,” Plume researchers wrote. “They are actively being used as a target for additional malware delivery, enabling cybercriminals to infect already-compromised devices with entirely new malware families while remaining largely invisible to the device owner.”
