Android malware once found a way onto phones before they even shipped
Today, Google posted what amounts to a case study of some very persistent and clever hackers who kept trying to get malware on Android phones. It’s about the “Triada family” of apps designed to put spam and ads on a device. After a brief history of how it started in 2016 and an overview of how early versions worked, Google got to the surprising turn in the story: Triada devised a method to get malware on Android phones virtually at the factory, before customers had even opened the box or even installed a single app.
The trick is that a whole lot of smartphone manufacturers don’t have the chops necessary to build all the features they want to use in-house, so they depend on third party vendors to build them. Those third party vendors…
