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Shopping app Temu is “dangerous malware,” spying on your texts, U.S. lawsuit claims
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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Technology
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I'd believe it because I remember the same being true for TikTok.
I don't have the links on me right now, but I remember clearly that when tiktok was new, engineers trying to figure out what data it collected found that the app could recognize when it was being observed, and would "rewite" itself to evade detection.
They noted that they'd never seen this outside of sophisticated malware, and doubted that a social media company had the resources to write such a program.
Em... writing a different manifest and asking the OS to reinstall itself, is not rocket science. Detecting that it's running in a testing environment and not asking for permission to access some types of data, is also quite easy. Downloading a different update or modules depending on which device and environment it gets installed to, is basic functionality.
It's still sneaky behavior and a dark pattern, but come on.
Uh, as someone who does malware analysis, sandbox detection is not easy, and is certainly not something that a non-malware-developer/analyst knows how to do. This isn't 2005 where sandboxes are listing their names in the registry/ system config files.
I haven't done sandbox detection for some years now, but around 2020, it was already "difficult" as in hard to write from scratch... yet already skid easy as in "copy+paste" from something that does it already. Surely newer sandboxes take more stuff into account, but at the same time more detection examples get published, simply advancing the starting point.
So maybe TikTok has a few people focused on it, possibly with some CI tests for several sandboxes. I don't think it's particularly hard to do 🤷