I just received a new Fire TV cube gen 3, because my old one is malfunctioning. I know, I hate these devices myself, but it’s the only option right now, since a new version of the Nvidia shield isn’t coming in the foreseeable future.
So, I plugged in the power chord and the HDMI cable into the cube.
When it booted up it showed a screen that it’s downloading the newest update. At first I thought this must be some typo-bug on the initial boot steps, because I haven’t even connected it to the internet yet, neither via cable nor did I go through the wifi setup.
After the update has finished, I was greeted with my real name and the cube indeed had the actual WiFi settings!
WTF?! How’s that even possible?
Ie: any amazon smart device; which are becoming increasingly popular and found in many homes globally.
Also, I’m not taking about someone targeting me, you, or anyone specifically. I’m talking about someone wandering around looking for homes that happen to have a vulnerable device and seeing where they can get from there.
Really not hard to find.
Trivial when you consider not everyone lives in a single-family home with significant yardspace around it. Apartments exist, so do smaller multi-family dwellings.
The useful info here being your WIFI password (the info this connection is intended to spread) allowing an attacker to piviot to the rest of your network.
This would be where I’ve repeatedly talked about an attacker being able to purchase an amazon device, jailbreak it, and use it to connect to your network
They can buy a device from Amazon then have all the time in the world to figure out a method of retrieving data from it. Once a method is worked out, they then deploy it against unsuspecting victims. (ie any random home they can get near and find an amazon device thats broadcasting looking for new devices)
I completely agree which is why I’m not happy with Amazon providing a hole to achieve exactly that.
Oh, by the way, the person with the device has to have received one that wasn’t already tied to THEIR account in any way. You know, like by the automated system that sends these things out reading a barcode on the side of the box that associates device IDs with a particular account. Not sure about anything else but this was the case a decade ago when I bought my first Kindle. I’d imagine it’s a bit more sophisticated now.
Go hang around a random apartment complex with wifi sniffing boxes and see how long it is before someone tackles you.
Honey, if you think a wifi password is needed to pivot to a network then you don’t know what the word pivot means. At that point you’re fucking BREACHED, BITCH. There’s no pivoting, only ownership.
Ah yes, just jailbreak the Amazon device with phantom software that somehow has completely different checksums but still… has the same checksums.
All of this just illustrates you’re an ignorant-ass that doesn’t know how any of this works, wringing your hands about scenarios that DO NOT EXIST IN THE REAL WORLD.
If I absolutely need to get into your network I’m not fucking around with a fucking rooted Amazon FireTV I’m just going to CRACK YOUR FUCKING WIFI PASSWORD DIRECTLY.
Apparently I have all day every day to fuck around so why do I give a shit about it taking a week or two?
More likely, I’ll walk up to your door with my phone in my hand and go “Hey, I just moved into the apartment next to yours and the wifi up at the office is broken. Could I log onto yours for a moment and pay a bill real quick? I apparently don’t get any damn signal here either. I just moved from a fuckin’ building where I had no signal, you’d think they’d have figured it out by now!”
And almost every time this will be more than enough.
Can’t this all be prevented by the already connected devices checking if the new device matches a newly purchased, not yet set up device in your purchase history? Really slim chance someone eavesdrops on its id and retransmits fast enough to hijack the setup
Possibly.
A) has amazon actually implemented such a system?
B) do you trust it’s functioning correctly? Both now and for the foreseeable future.(would/could you even know if it wasn’t?)
Side note: does this feature work with factory reset and/or re-sold devices?