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> So there is a (IMHO) shady market out there that gives app developers on iOS, Android, MacOS and Windows money for including a library into their apps that se
by jeroenhd 2y ago
> So there is a (IMHO) shady market out there that gives app developers on iOS, Android, MacOS and Windows money for including a library into their apps that sells users network bandwidth
AKA "why do Cloudflare and Google make me fill out these CAPTCHAs all day"
I don't know why Play Protect/MS Defender/whatever Apple has for antivirus don't classify apps that embed such malware as such. It's ridiculous that this is allowed to go on when detection is so easy. I don't know a more obvious example of a trojan than an SDK library making a user's device part of a botnet.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dx4100 2y agoCloudflare and Google use CAPTCHAs to sell web scrapers? I don't get your point. I was under the impression the data is used to train models.
- cuu508 2y agoTrojans in your mobile apps ruin your IP's reputation which comes back to you in the form of frequent, annoying CAPTCHAs.
- aloha2436 2y agoThe implication is that the users that are being constantly presented with CAPTCHAs are experiencing that because they are unwittingly proxying scrapers through their devices via malicious apps they've installed.
- pentae 2y ago.. or that other people on their network/Shared public IP have installed
- evgpbfhnr 2y agoor just that they don't run windows/mac OS with chome like everyone else and it's "suspicious". I get cloudflare capchas all the time with firefox on linux... (and I'm pretty sure there's no such app in my home network!)
- Doxin 2y agoFWIW I run firefox on linux too, and I don't have any trouble with cloudflare captchas. I get them every now and then but definitely not all the time.
- jeroenhd 2y agoWhen a random device on your network gets infected with crap like this, your network becomes a bot egress point, and anti bot networks respond appropriately. Cloudflare, Akamai, even Google will start showing CAPTCHAs for every website they protect when your network starts hitting random servers with scrapers or DDoS attacks. This is even worse with CG-NAT if you don't have IPv6 to solve the CG-NAT problem. I don't think the data they collect is used to train anything these days. Cloudflare is using AI generated images for CAPTCHAs and Google's actual CAPTCHAs are easier for bots than humans at this point (it's the passive monitoring that makes it still work a little bit).
- areyourllySorry 2y agoit's not technically malware, you agreed to it when you accepted the terms of service :^)
- L-four 2y agoIt's malware it does something malicious.