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Comment by wesapien | Hacker News Reader

I just don't see many supposed grandma's (or prey people) make tweaks or go out and seek software outside of the playstore. The only reason my dad uses Newpipe is because of me. Someone knowledgeable has to introduce it to them. The most adventurous thing these people will do on their own is download apps on the playstore by themselves and sign in their app.

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Until grandma gets a call from a nice gentleman at “Google tech support” who walks her through the process.

Or a nice popup informing her that her phone is infected with 1 billion viruses and she needs AV software right this minute.

If they take the bait, them warning signs are useless. You're giving a novice a choice between removing the viruses on their phone and the dangers of installing third party software. Do you think the prey will be like: wait a minute, I see what this malware is doing? Ha! lmao

iOS also has the ability to trick users into downloading virus protectors. But they really can’t do much harm

that's because you are downloading from the apple app store ... try jailbreaking your iPhone and keep installing random things from cydia. Pwnage awaits

Doesn’t that kind of make the point why app stores and a good sandbox are fair trade offs?

If the mark/prey believes they are talking to a legitimate tech support person, their mostly screwed. The warning sign isn't there to stop a con artist or social engineering.

How would this type of attack work on an android that is locked to play store?

I guess you could use a web phishing page, but you couldn’t remote access their device. Maybe you could get a malicious data capture app into the play store that simply collects data, but it would eventually get banned

If the aim is to have grandma download a malicious app, you direct her to download one of the countless malicious apps that find their way to the play store.

And my mom who is 80 and is somewhat computer literate - she is a retired school teacher who used our Apple //e with AppleWorks back in the 80s and has had multiple fairly up to date computers since then.

She went to download a printer driver and she went on a website that had crapware. It’s not just the shady websites. CNET (download.com) and whatever company use to own Slashdot use to bundle Firefox with crapware.

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