The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy(blog.includesecurity.com) |
The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy(blog.includesecurity.com) |
wss://proxyjs.brdtnet.com:443
This hostname resolves to AWS Global Accelerator IPs
There is some irony that both the scrapers and the websites being scraped are probably hosted on AWS, while playing an elaborate cat-and-mouse game pretending that they weren't.
> On every launch the SDK calls:
GET <https://clientsdk.bright-sdk.com/sdk_config_ios.json>?appid=<bundle>&ver=<sdk-version>&uuid=sdk-ios-<32hex>
I have had to back my mother down from that precipice on her own TV so I know it's worth worrying about. The siren call of an entirely empty TV homescreen beckoning us with a struck-out radio tower icon. "We have Disney+ and CraveTV too... press [menu]... pay no attention to the sticky note your son put on the coffee table"
This happened to me. After they left, I tried a factory reset, but I don't have confidence there's not some code to remember previously saved wifi connections because my tinfoil hat is firmly in place. However, as you've said I only use the TV as an HDMI receiver. None of the TV's apps are used again. So I'm not sure how much they can detect from just the use of the HDMI port as the only thing being used. The games we play to get the subsidized pricing.
Thankfully, the blast radius of this is nothing without connectivity.
I'd love to find and remove any apps from my devices that have this SDk active.
https://www.thequantizer.com/tutorials/wireshark-iphone-traf...
It has been a while since I personally did such traces, but Wireshark was very simple to use and once the network is exposed, it has lots of information available online if you need more.
I found bypassing your VPN particularly appalling, as is the whole thing. Personally, it would be amazing if there were a limit on how much can be in Terms of Service, as no one wants to read that much anymore.
> On iOS, this bypasses any configured VPN’s tun0 interface entirely. The peer tunnel does not cross a user-configured VPN, even when the rest of the app’s HTTPS traffic does.
What's a legitimate use case for this API? When/why should an app be allowed to bypass a user-configured VPN?
When you're the application providing the VPN or when you're any app built to communicate with something on a local-ish network, not something actually reachable globally.
temporarily if full tunnelling isn't working, one can split tunnel to route around issues due to VPN
But imo an app should never bypass something like a network boundary.
There is discernible lag from proxy to c&c node. The individual bots don't have access to a lot of compute, and are sometimes restricted wrt feature set (e.g. proprietary video codecs).
There are a few other techniques. It's a cat and mouse game though. And the bot owners are usually more motivated than you are.
Imaging having the police show up at your door because they've figured out that you're trafficking child porn, when the actual culprit is someone that is using your TV as a proxy to trade child porn.
If there is any good news about this, it is that the fatigue seems to be hitting normal people. Buddy from work complained to me how he now is now forced to be a full blown wifi/internet admin so that his kids' restrictions/limits are appropriately enforced.
I am just venting, because I am not entirely certain what an appropriate solution here is.
> you are allowing Bright Data to occasionally use your device’s free resources and _IP address to download public web data from the internet_. (emphasis mine)
I think the misleading part -- to the end-user -- is the "download public web data" part. If the data is public why can't Bright Data download it themselves? Well, because the other end doesn't want them to, apparently. The product is make you help Bright Data circumvent the undesired properties of the "public" data providers, on behalf of someone who happens to have the cash but as of yet is at the short end of the Internet stick (for all the right reasons, I'd say).
This is absolutely deplorable, but knowing the directions this is heading, I am neither surprised nor concerned, frankly. People have long voted with their wallet -- it's not the privacy-conscious Joe the Hacker that is being proxied through here, it's our parents and millions of people who just want entertainment at the end of the working day, including _parents_ of small children.
Day by day the dark Internet theory sounds more plausible, and frankly I am all there for it. The Internet will collapse into a feudal internetwork where any routing will need hop-by-hop key, so real people (and agents, frankly) can maintain a measure of trust that right now is being actively circumvented.
Ah yes. The big privacy scraping company called themselves The Luminati. It’s like they are side-investing in tin foil hats or something.
I was unable to find related Android SDKs. I tried looking at the various apps on AppGoblin to find the android versions, then looking through their unmapped SDK parts but didn't see anything.
https://github.com/BrightSDK/bright-sdk-gradle-plugin-docs
This looks like it should just be "com.brightdata" but I did not find anything. With 60 iOS apps there must be apps with Android SDK, but I'm not sure why I am not finding any.
If anyone knows, or would like to chat feel free to connect. I'm happy to share data.
So what I have now is a pre-smart TV I found at the thrift, still very good picture that’s more than enough for the few times I use it.
There should be a way to disable the “smart” garbage in new TVs, or an option to buy normal ones at least.
> MDM, mobile EDR
Anyone care to ELI5 these?
Mobile EDR: Endpoint detection and response. This is cybersecurity software to monitor and deal with network activity happening in mobile devices like tablets, phones, etc…
If the divide was data center vs residential IPs, fine, but thanks to Bright Data and friends, residential IPs are getting suspicious as well, so I guess the next step is full-on client verification then...
Which presumably passes it a URL to scrape and waits for it to return the data.
What happens if I write my own tool that connects to that C&C server, waits for a URL to scrape, and returns gigabytes of freshly brewed hot horseshit?
If they're making a request to my machine to go and curl a page, how do they even know whether or not it was https?
"Our findings indicate that (1) ACR operates even when it is used as a “dumb” display via HDMI"
"For both LG (a) and Samsung (b)TVs, the scenarios with the highest ACR traffic are Linear and HDMI."
As far as I have found from a lot of menu spelunking, this agreement is irrevocable. If I ever go online, it will be used.
We really need normies to care enough about this to the point manufacturers will need to think they need to advertise on their TVs that they are privacy-friendly and don’t collect anything as a selling point. Until then, they don’t really care. I just wish someone like Apple made a TV with their Apple TV functionality baked in that I could trust.
I think they may have scaled back from this, but they were running a 100% malware-style playbook to hit the Tiktok servers like it was some kinda sketchy C2 package. Lots of attempts of their own DoH (and DoT!) and normal DNS servers to try to get into the Tiktok network.