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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

> So there is a (IMHO) shady market out there that gives app developers on iOS, Android, MacOS and Windows money for including a library into their apps that sells users network bandwidth

AKA "why do Cloudflare and Google make me fill out these CAPTCHAs all day"

I don't know why Play Protect/MS Defender/whatever Apple has for antivirus don't classify apps that embed such malware as such. It's ridiculous that this is allowed to go on when detection is so easy. I don't know a more obvious example of a trojan than an SDK library making a user's device part of a botnet.

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Cloudflare and Google use CAPTCHAs to sell web scrapers? I don't get your point. I was under the impression the data is used to train models.

Trojans in your mobile apps ruin your IP's reputation which comes back to you in the form of frequent, annoying CAPTCHAs.

The implication is that the users that are being constantly presented with CAPTCHAs are experiencing that because they are unwittingly proxying scrapers through their devices via malicious apps they've installed.

.. or that other people on their network/Shared public IP have installed

or just that they don't run windows/mac OS with chome like everyone else and it's "suspicious". I get cloudflare capchas all the time with firefox on linux... (and I'm pretty sure there's no such app in my home network!)

FWIW I run firefox on linux too, and I don't have any trouble with cloudflare captchas. I get them every now and then but definitely not all the time.

When a random device on your network gets infected with crap like this, your network becomes a bot egress point, and anti bot networks respond appropriately. Cloudflare, Akamai, even Google will start showing CAPTCHAs for every website they protect when your network starts hitting random servers with scrapers or DDoS attacks.

This is even worse with CG-NAT if you don't have IPv6 to solve the CG-NAT problem.

I don't think the data they collect is used to train anything these days. Cloudflare is using AI generated images for CAPTCHAs and Google's actual CAPTCHAs are easier for bots than humans at this point (it's the passive monitoring that makes it still work a little bit).

it's not technically malware, you agreed to it when you accepted the terms of service :^)

It's malware it does something malicious.

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