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Malware infects Android-based automotive head unit firmware
- waazy 1mo agothis is crazy
- Retr0id 1mo ago> Since a head unit typically holds nothing of value to an attacker, one of the more likely attack scenarios using “classic” Android malware is infecting the device to recruit it into a botnet People do pair them with their phones, though. I could imagine a future version of malware like this propagating laterally.
- buckle8017 1mo agoHead units can log location, navigation start and end points, call logs, call audio, and scrape full contact lists. Just off the top of my head.
- Retr0id 1mo agoThat's scary from a user perspective, but harder to monetise at scale as an attacker. Proxy endpoints are just another commodity (and offer recurring revenue).
- stymaar 1mo agoYeah, especially since most of these are already available for purchase from data brokers.
- Zigurd 1mo agoThey're called data brokers because they have a buy side, too. That might be peanuts to you, but to an AliExpress seller, it could be most of their profit.
- wongarsu 1mo agoIf you infect tens of vehicles that's not that valuable. But if you infect ten thousand vehicles, convinced a trusted member of one of the bigger black hat forums it's real and have him vouch for your marketplace post, there should be some buyers for full movement profiles, call logs and address books of ten thousand people And doing that doesn't really interfere with also setting up and selling proxy endpoints
- carstenhag 1mo agoSome head units (working with a 1st party one atm) have two networks: OEM-paid (unlimited data) and user-paid. A 3rd party apk would be consuming all bought traffic quite soon. Also typical Android permissions still apply. The user would need to grant the malicious app contacts, call logs, etc permissions.
- kotaKat 1mo agoIt seems like this exploit is targeting those that keep their phones tethered for connectivity outwards or hooked a USB modem or a SIM card into a cell-equipped headunit. The only valuable thing there is the relatively 'clean' mobile connection... and this malware's dropping a residential proxy endpoint on the headunit to take advantage of it. Bonus points if the headunit is always connected and always powered up to a +12v rail in the car, that's free and always-on real estate!
- brookst 1mo agoHead units aren’t always-on. Typically they go into a low power standby 2-5 minutes after ignition / accessory mode turns off, and go completely power-off 30-ish minutes later. Otherwise any car sitting unused for a week or two would have a dead battery.
- Zigurd 1mo agoI learned that not all electronics goes into low power mode even when designed to run off a car battery, from using a cheap Bluetooth OBDII dongle.
- smilespray 1mo agoIf that was one of those ELM327 dongles, yes they have 12V and are known to drain your battery. They're only meant for short diagnostic runs.
- wildzzz 1mo agoA lot of older cars didn't turn off their OBD port, have their headunits go into standby, or even turn off the cigarette lighter port. Early OBD ports connected to dealer computers for a few minutes, not an always on dongle. Plain headunits just play music, what could they possibly accomplish by staying on when you turn off the car? It was a convenience having the cigarette outlet left powered so you could light a cigarette without turning on the car. Other than maybe a bag phone, what would you possibly plug into that?
- axegon_ 1mo agoAlmost, though I understand I am the exception rather than the rule: Personally I have an aftermarket android head unit since the standard one was incredibly basic, no real time navigation updates, updating maps was a pain in the ass and so on. Initially I did pair it with my phone but since it is an aftermarket unit from a company which apparently does not exist anymore, newer phones cannot be paired with it. So my only option was to go the opposite route and use my phone as a wireless hotspot(almost - there's a raspberry pi with openwrt between the two). And since I self-host everything, I had no choice but to hook it up to my vpn. That said, I understand the implications of doing this so ultimately the network access it gets is incredibly limited: everything that is not my music server and the maps provider has been cut off completely. The downside is that every now and then I get a "can't connect to google services" notification though that is technically reassuring from a security perspective.
- madduci 1mo agoSome automakers like Nissan bring their own 4G SIM, which makes the pairing of phone not important, as the head unit can access Internet by itself
- drnick1 1mo agoKeep in mind however that the 4G SIM is not there for the driver's benefit, but for Nissan's. It collects extremely invasive telemetry that is then sold to data brokers and consumed by car insurers and government agencies, among others. This is why I won't drive a car that I own without first removing the onboard modem.
- madduci 1mo agoExactly and with the malware is much worse
- bluGill 1mo agoHow long until the 4G networks are turned off? There are a lot of cars that have a 3G sim or even a 2G sim. They can do nothing because those networks have been turned off. At least I'm not aware of any car where they updated the radio in the car when the network got turned off. By contrast, I work for John Deere and just down the hall from me are people who made a ton of money when the 2G network got turned off because a lot of customers paid $1,000 upgrade to a newer radio. I think most people would agree that there is no future that their car radio does that is worth paying money to upgrade when the cell network turns off. At John Deere, we're lucky that we have found pictures that customers find valuable enough that they are willing to pay to upgrade the radio when it goes obsolete.
- toast0 1mo ago> How long until the 4G networks are turned off? There are a lot of cars that have a 3G sim or even a 2G sim. They can do nothing because those networks have been turned off. There's a good chance it will last longer than 3G. 5G was designed to coexist with 4G so a 5G base station can (optionally) use a 4G compatible beacon and use 4G for some timeslots and 5G for others. Even if 6G doesn't do the same, 4G can live until 5G is turned off. 2G and 3G needed a whole channel allocated, which was too much in the US anyway. I understand in some countries they turned off 3G but left one channel of 2G for industrial/embedded devices; maybe one channel per network or maybe one channel that all networks could roam to ... roaming seems more permissive outside the US, too.
- ghostly_s 1mo ago"Pairing" with a head unit is not an open socket to dump anything you care to down the wire. That would require finding a rather remarkable vulnerability in one of the audio/address book/screen mirroring APIs the devices use.
- Retr0id 1mo agoBluetooth RCEs have happened in the past and will happen again.
- dolmen 1mo agoAlso cars are often near other cars. Which offer wireless connectivity. Car software is almost never updated and is years old. Nothing could go wrong.
- davoneus 1mo agoThe logical endpoint of the entire "the car as software" concept. Can't wait for the security vendors to start hawking "AV for your car"
- Retr0id 1mo agoI hope we see "de-smartification" conversion kits that replace the electronics with more straightforward (and repairable) offline equivalents. The ultimate AV.
- doublerabbit 1mo agoIt's already in televisions. Not long now.
- lvbyte 1mo ago[dead]
- jackdecker 1mo agoFor whatever reason, the idea of this being in my car is relatively scarier for me than if this was just my phone ? I think partially as my mental model of both android auto and CarPlay is that they operate as a passthrough of my device rather than as an separate installation of the OS entirely (I wasn’t aware the head unit itself had the ability to install APKs independently). Also, feel like John Gruber is going to have a field day with this one
- dybber 1mo agoI don’t believe this is Android auto running from a phone, but a situation where the manufacturer have used Android Automotive as operating system for the built in head unit. As e.g. on Volvo’s.
- MBCook 1mo agoAndroid Automotive is the infotainment system’s OS and runs fully without a phone. Android Auto is the Google equivalent of CarPlay and runs on your phone. It’s easy to confuse. Like watching Apple TV on your Apple TV in Apple’s TV app.
- Zigurd 1mo agoDid they hire their branding person from Microsoft? And how about AppFunctions (Google) and AppIntents (Apple)?
- 1mo ago
- bluGill 1mo agoOne more reason cars should not be internet connected. They last for decades and manufactures don't want to support their cars that long. Always proxy to a phone and the attack surface is limited to things that are updated.
- miohtama 1mo ago[flagged]
- 1970-01-01 1mo ago..to add to a botnet for click fraud. The duality of cybersecurity is interesting. Sometimes the high bar is cleared just to enable a low bar to go lower. Those PLCs monitoring water were ignored for a very long time because they couldn't click on ads. It took a war for them to become a target.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- chrisjj 1mo ago> Those PLCs monitoring water were ignored for a very long time because they couldn't click on ads. Somehow I doubt it. They're ripe for ransomware attack.
- sehw 1mo ago[dead]
- MBCook 1mo agoSo to do this the attacker has to compromise the update servers at $CAR_COMPANY?
- timmmmmmay 1mo agono, the update servers at $sketchy_aliexpress_aftermarket_head_unit_company, probably somewhat easier
- dzdt 1mo agoThere are a lot of cars out there where the head unit has connection to the CAN bus. Which means this malware vector could be used to directly cause crashes. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19751872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19751872
- jiaosdjf 1mo agoManufacturers should be sued to absolute oblivion for doing what any developer would tell you is a security hole.
- 01100011 1mo agoAn aftermarket head unit connects to the CAN bus? The aftermarket head unit I installed certainly doesn't. Are you sure what you are saying, which is true for OEM units, applies to aftermarket ones?
- dx4100 1mo agoMany do - the one I was looking at for my vehicle in particular uses it to restore the steering wheel controls (which are broadcast over the CAN-B low speed bus)
- karlshea 1mo agoMine does. Its dashboard shows fuel level and a bunch of other things and I can bring up a speedometer/rpm app. I believe the connection exists because the steering wheel buttons/iDrive talk to the original head unit over CAN.
- rootusrootus 1mo agoThat’s wild, I’ve never run across a head unit that had me connect OBD2. I think I would just ignore that bit of the install instructions.
- karlshea 1mo agoI did not connect ODB2. The HU I got puts itself as a passthrough to the stock BMW HU (which you still need to be able to use, you switch the screen to its output by holding down a button), and that connector includes CAN. There are numerous reasons the HU needs CAN, for example to get the steering wheel angle to be able to draw the guides over the backup camera feed. Or to switch to the backup camera feed when you put the car in reverse.
- IshKebab 1mo agoUm so which car is this? tw.com doesn't seem to be in use.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- spicyjpeg 1mo agoThe article does not make it particularly clear, but the malware in question is delivered through official first-party OTA updates on cheap Chinese aftermarket head units that happen to run Android. It cannot self-propagate to any Android-based head unit, nor does it affect Android Auto which is a "dumb" screen mirroring protocol with the bulk of the software running on the connected phone rather than the head unit. This seems to be a very similar situation to that of cheap generic Android TV streaming boxes, which often come pre-infected from the factory with residential proxies and other malware as well; most of the infrastructure is likely shared.
- manbash 1mo agoIndeed this is an odd disclosure and I am not familiar with past posts by them. Moreover, no CVE is associated with this claimed vulnerability. It's not even stated which Android version or automotive head-unit variant version is affected.
- _joel 1mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaspersky_and_the_Russian_government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaspersky_and_the_Russian_gove...
- p-e-w 1mo ago[flagged]
- DaSHacka 1mo agoWelcome to Wikipedia
- orbital-decay 1mo agoWikipedia's source policy makes it nearly impossible to refer to anything that is not in the media, and any sensitive article has to use weasel words like this. Are you just noting the issue with the article, or actually doubting that Kaspersky Labs is a de-facto FSB branch since at least 2015?
- promptspheree 1mo ago[flagged]
- gchamonlive 1mo agoCan't be safer than the non-entertainment system from WV Up! that's just a built-in head mount for your phone. Grab one with a large screen and it's the safest thing you can get. Android still has an auto mode for this where it controls the car's audio system through headless bindings, not sure this malware would target this, but just by being a simpler system chances are it's safer too
- jiaosdjf 1mo ago"How has the automotive industry adapted to decades of computing best practices?" - Head units connected to CAN bus with bluetooth vulnerabilities allowing attacker to remotely activate locks and windows and sometimes even driving controls - Unsecured CAN bus cables everywhere allowing cars to be stolen through headlights and behind mud guard flaps - Keyless entry basically a shit show of faraday pouches - OBD port allowing thieves to clone a full key in seconds - Even cars in decent neighbourhoods have to use steering locks Sorry but this is a fucking joke and the automotive industry is cancer. At least Tesla actually bothers with user updates and production improvements, most other manufacturers just shit out the same model 5 years in a row with an extra cup holder and USB port (probably rootable) if you're lucky. That said, Tesla's insistence that everything be done by touch screen is dog shit. All this and still for 99% of cars my iPhone stuck to the dashboard provides better maps and entertainment and yet they can't even make a fucking phone holder standard, not even a fucking mounting point so I don't have to block an air vent.
- smilespray 1mo agoYou had me until you started giving Tesla the thumbs-up, despite your caveat.
- Telaneo 1mo ago> "How has the automotive industry adapted to decades of computing best practices?" Simple. It hasn't.
- newtwentysix 1mo agoI don't know tesla cars. I absolutely agree with the rest of your points
- zb3 1mo agoI'd not consider it malware if its sole purpose is to do ad/click fraud. The user is not the target here, the user's enemies are :)
- doublerabbit 1mo agoNorton AntiVirus for your car ECU's. Protect your carfor just $220.95/month * * Cars without subscription causes acceleration to be restricted to 60mph. After discovering the new OLED televisions come with antivirus, I'm done with thinking technology will ever be secure.
- Telaneo 1mo agoEven from this perspective, it's pretty easy to make things more secure by having less technology. Have the infotainment system just be a blank canvas for Carplay or AA to display on (there does need to be a bit back and fourth, phone needs to send audio to car, car needs to send GPS, speed and state of charge to phone (not strictly necessary, but there are user benefits from the phone having this information). The car itself doesn't need a whole internet-connected general purpose computer attached to it, but doing that is an easy way for the manufacturer to supposedly add value. Similarly, the LG kerfuffle could be solved by their monitors just being monitors, and not throwing in pointless extras that just broadens their attack surface. Monitors don't need to be general purpose computing devices either. I shouldn't have to worry about general computing problems, like getting infected with malware, outside of computers that obviously are general purpose (i.e. phone, desktop, laptop, and anything else I intentionally set up with foreknowledge of it being general purpose and internet-connected, like a Raspberry Pi).
- tiahura 1mo agoApple's gatekeeping doesn't make IPhone users any safer.
- hndbwksam7 1mo agoConcise and useful, rare combo
- codedokode 1mo agoCould these proxies be sold to AI companies for scraping websites?
- coachdaniel2026 1mo ago[flagged]