Redditor claims Chinese border guards installed malware on his phone

Quite accurate. Especially at border crossings.

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Someone from Citizen Lab’s board offered to buy the phone. LMFAO.

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That’s a little extreme. I do often keep my phone in airplane mode when not using it, and refrain from doing anything super sensitive (ex: banking). But otherwise I route all my traffic through a VPN with zero issues. It’s extremely unlikely someone is going to push some sort of zero day over the air pwn to a random defcon attendee.

Though as a practical matter cell reception is so bad on the on floor it’s better to just switch your device off than have the battery drain.

I do use cash for pretty much all purchases though - I think it’s more likely someone will own a POS unit.

Don’t you need a visa too, even for transit? Or is that just USA?

I think you underestimate the power of “if you patch this exploit, we’re shutting you out of a market of 1 billion people” when it comes to a slow AI.

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/twelve-days-in-xinjiang-how-chinas-surveillance-state-overwhelms-daily-life-1513700355

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Maybe. But I find it hard to believe they’d be able to keep it under wraps if they’re using it this frequently and casually. It’s one thing to have the capacity to crack open a confiscated phone, but if they’re installing malware on an iPhone and/or jailbreaking the thing without the owner’s consent and then returning the phone to the user, that’s relatively easy to detect after the fact and would be absolutely viral news.

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I can easily see this being done to the natives of Xinjiang, especially if they are Uighur, but it does seem poorly thought out to install this on the phones of non-Chinese, who are going to almost definitely leave the country with their phones.

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Maybe there are backdoors built into chinese made phones. Like standard passwords which will always unlock the phone and permit installations.

Open always wins!

That’s why it’s a good idea to keep up with software updates. There’s usually a bit of a lag before a jailbreak is found.

Maybe there are backdoors built into chinese made phones

Sure. But if you mean iPhones specifically, it would be a pretty massive scandal if someone brought their infiltrated iPhone to Gizmodo or whatever, since that’s absolutely not supposed to be possible with iPhones. It would be global viral tech news.

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