172: SuperBox

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25:12Okay, my dad says he does not have one, but he says the guy at the gym has one and he keeps inviting him over to come watch shows. Okay, so after that talk, what happened next? How can I put this without sounding crazy?

25:31our government was very, very interested in knowing more. I can put it to you that way. Yeah, word got out and an investigation was opened up and they brought her in to learn more. If this is another nation trying to plant boxes in family homes across America with malicious intent, then the Department of Defense was interested in knowing more. But the thing was, because this was now an active investigation, conversation it meant deadass had to be quiet about this. So she wasn't allowed to talk publicly about it. But it didn't stop her from researching it further and talking privately about it.

26:05So for years she continued to research it and gave talks. But every one of those talks had to be no cameras, no recording, no photos in order to keep this hush hush. And it's been driving me crazy since I've been attending her talks for years. And I think it's such a good story to get out to you. but she's never been allowed to be interviewed for it. And that's why I'm so happy to finally, finally, finally get this interview to tell you her story. But as it turns out, this wasn't the first time we've seen bad boxes. Human security and Google and all those guys had kind of done the stuff on like, you know, the first bad box.

26:39And so, and they were sourced for a lot of the stuff on the second bad box. But we basically discovered that this thing was part of what's now referred to as the bad box botnet. The bad box botnet. So we've been referring to it as Superbox this whole time. Where's Badbox come from? Badbox comes from the fact that there are just other Android streaming devices, and they're actually a lot cheaper. And this was actually an anomaly that I noticed when I was looking at the Superbox. They're anywhere from$30 to maybe$100 at most. And so again, cheap devices, they're kind of everywhere. They can get them out there pretty quickly.

27:14And so a lot of those made sense, already infected. you know, the behavior looked the same. Once I started kind of like providing information and stuff. And so we all came to the determination that it should just be, it's still Badbox, but it's Badbox 2.0, even though we'd shut down the first Badbox. And so, yeah, it's for any Android basically device that's like got malware or is beaconing out to interesting places, etc. But the Superbox, like my focus on it is because it's$300. and the rest of them are like 30. So why is this one$300? So she gave the authorities all the information that she discovered about this.

27:54I provided, you know, network traffic, some logs, just things so that they could get an idea of what they were looking at. And I just kind of took it from there. So, okay. And then, and then for your own, you didn't stop with your own research. Oh, no. I was like, we're not even, we haven't even scratched the surface. Like I'm, you know, we're still like, at that point I was just like, there's still more. Like, I know there's still more because there were still so many unanswered questions. Like, okay, I get why it's beaconing. I get that it's talking to this IP. But like, again, why? Why? So I keep digging.

28:29I just keep digging. And I continue to dig. And I continue to dig. She got obsessed with this box. And she knew she needed to skill up in order to research it better. So she took some SANS courses, got her GCIA certification, upgraded her tools, and once again looked at the traffic this thing was sending. She saw that it was talking to a lot of domains ending in.top. Like most websites end in.com, but not this box. It likes speaking to things in the.top domain. Which like we all know there's nothing good for anybody in a.top domain. Like that's not for us. Of course it talked a lot to the.cn domains too, which is clearly China.

29:08She studied protocols deeper. domains, IP addresses, analyze the hardware, and the company that makes it all. And she saw that this thing was just automatically downloading different apps and stuff for Android and was able to capture those and analyze those. So that was new for me too. Like I said, I worked at the SOC. Like I did my little alerts and like, okay, escalate. Like that's all I used to do. So to figure out how to like decompile APKs was like insane. But like I figured it out and I kind of started like looking inside of them and I'm like, oh, that doesn't seem right. Like you shouldn't be sending that in clear text or, you know, stuff like that.

29:42So, I mean, there was just so much smoke, right? Like I knew there was going to be fire. Because this thing is running the Android operating system. It has the Google Play Store. But of course, that's not where you'll find the thousands of channels that it says it has. Instead, you need to basically rip out the Google Play Store and instead install something called the Superbox App Store. What got me is when I tried to download the App Store and my firewall basically showed me that it was like a multi-layer encoded file. So it was zipped up like six, seven times. So that was weird because that's still not normal for an App Store.

30:20Like, I mean, if anything, like you should just be using the Google Play Store. It's an Android device, but they have their own App Store that you had to download and install to get access to their piracy apps. And their App Store looked nice and polished? Oh my God. It's pretty brutal. It's weird because you click on it, it installs, it turns blue, which I thought was just kind of funny. I'm like, why is it blue? You click on it and it just has the three apps in there. Like there's nothing else in it. So it's only so you can, again, get access to their stuff and they want it to look as legitimate as possible so people will use it.

30:55You'll appreciate this. So they're all running Android debug bridge, which makes sense if they're, you know, pretending to be an Android device because it's not an Android TV device. It's just straight up Android, which is already weird from the other types of devices. This was super strange to me because there's no authentication on it. I was able to connect just straight across the Android debug bridge. And then I just typed in SU for switch user and it gave me a root shell. So you have root access to the Superbox? I have root access to the six that I have at my house. And then I did finally dump the firmware and there's entire sectors missing off of the device.

31:42If you're looking at, say, the boot structure, There's 27 partitions, but you can only see 15. What? Right. That doesn't make any sense. It's not normal. That is strange. Yeah. I just assume that if there are partitions on it, but you can't see them, then that means it has some sort of software deep inside it. And who knows what's going on in there? What's in those partitions? And how scary is it? Nobody knows. I'm also at the same time still digging into the Shell company. I mean, they have these weird like fake certificates of award to like look legitimate. And I'm like, what even is, is that supposed to be like a certificate of like authenticity?

32:23That's basically what they're putting out for the super boxes to make them look legit. Yeah. So the packaging of this thing, you got a few, right? And so what is it? What is, does it just look like a regular device or is there anything silly about it? I mean, I look at it and I'm like, why does it look evil? Like it feels evil to me. Like if you've ever like seen something, you're like, I don't like that. It kind of gives me those vibes, but it says 6K on the box. 6K. Right. What is 6K? I must have missed that memo between 4K and 8K. But yeah, it has 6K on the box. And there's even regulatory information printed on the box, but then we can't find FCC information on it.

33:02Okay. So the regulatory stuff looks like it's just made up. Yeah. Yeah. And we're certified and all these things, but not really. Right. Wow, that's crazy. That's illegal. Well, and so the average everyday person, it looks like anything else they might buy. It's got the regulatory information. It tells me what the product is. It says who makes it. That seems highly illegal. The government is not going to want you to put regulated certifications on there that aren't, especially for some of the safe electronics out there. Exactly. That make it safe for consumers. They're just putting it on there and not...

33:37It's not actually vetted. They're just like, here you go. This is safe for consumers. it's ridiculous and it just stays ridiculous so like you know just buckle up

33:51there's just so many glaring like red flags I would call them more like neon red flags if that's even like a thing I'm just again at this point this is like the end of 2024 at this point and I'm just like does no one else see this like no one else sees this really and so I get into 2025 and that's where it kind of like really started to take off. So the Bad Box PSA comes out in June. That was a huge deal. Oh yeah, I saw that announcement. Let me pull it up for you. It's titled, Home Internet Connected Devices Facilitate Criminal Activity. Here's what the FBI warning says. The FBI is issuing a public service announcement to warn the public about cyber criminals exploiting IoT devices.

34:36Cyber criminals gain unauthorized access to home networks through compromised IoT devices, such as TV streaming devices, digital projectors, aftermarket vehicle infotainment systems, digital picture frames, and other products. Most of the infected devices were manufactured in China. Cyber criminals gain unauthorized access to home networks by either configuring the product with malicious software prior to users purchasing or infecting the device with backdoors, usually during the setup process. Gosh, wow. So the FBI put this warning out, but that wasn't enough for them to get banned off of Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart marketplaces.

35:13And even with this FBI warning, it wasn't enough for dead ass to convince her father to get rid of it either. He did at least unplug it. Only when you're home. Only when I'm home. He probably plugs it back in when you leave. It's just so frustrating. All right, so how do you convince, imagine it's my dad here or your dad here. What do you say to them to say, do not do this? Because what matters to them, right? Yeah. So you have to bring it to their level. Well, so what was interesting, I think what got through to my dad was when I said, hey, like, if something goes wrong with this and, you know, you're in a pretty high position at your company, like, I mean, people are reporting their bank accounts getting hacked.

35:53Like, do you care about your money? Do you care about your retirement? Like, again, they're looking at your credentials. They're monitoring the network. They're going to see when you're logging into your bank and they're going to see when you're doing things that we might all consider sensitive. and if you don't want that to now become a negative or get exploited or become a problem, like you have to think about what you're bringing home on the network. Okay, you said someone's bank account got wiped out for this thing? Yeah, somebody reported on Reddit. They're like, oh, they tried to hack our bank account so put it on a guest network.

36:25Not stop using it, just put it on a separate network. Gosh, what are we even doing? Imagine you had some roommate that tried to steal money from your bank account every time you turned your back and was constantly spying on you. You wouldn't just move them to the guest bedroom, you'd throw them out of the house. How is it that this thing can clearly be so dangerous, yet people still don't throw it in the trash? It's because it's still proving value to them even after it's an apparently dangerous and harmful device to have in your home. And this puts me in deep thought, actually, on how to fix this.

36:58This isn't a one-off, it's an industry trend. And it's not even just an industry trend in cybersecurity, it's a bug in human beings. We often ignore good advice. Like we all know you should take your health seriously, eat healthy, work out five times a week, and get plenty of sleep. Yet most of us don't do it. It's not because we don't know better. We all know better. And there's nothing you should value more in your life than your own life. So it's not like there's something more important to focus on. Yet we still don't take care of ourselves properly. And this is what I think is a bug in human beings.

37:32We know what the right thing to do is, yet we still don't do it. And here's an example of this bug being exploited so perfectly. Even when the super box rears its ugly head and shows us how dangerous and harmful it is, people still use it because they like getting their TV shows. To be clear, how do you feel about piracy? I mean, I personally do not care. That's you and your business between you and your ISP. That has nothing to do with me. That's not what you're out here saying is bad. Yeah. It's the fact that to make it easier to have access to these things because a lot of people do not have the technical know-how to potentially participate in sailing the internet high seas safely, this is a one-stop easy pre-box shop.

38:21Can we talk more about who you were seeing getting these things? Yeah. So, you know, I had folks reporting to me that they were getting them mailed to them at their house. I'm like, what? and they work in oil and gas. And they're like, I didn't order this. So I'm like, yeah, definitely don't plug it in. And so one of those got sent to me. Wow, how scary is that? To have one mysteriously show up at your doorstep and you work in oil and gas? Man, this is a very serious and dangerous campaign. I already said this thing should be burned with fire, but now I think you need to take a sledgehammer to it first and then burn it.

39:01Of course, I'm seeing stuff on like social media, kind of all the different platforms like, oh, my parents got gifted one. My uncle was telling us about it. Like all the again, it was it was lots of stuff like that. I had a friend in Sacramento tell me that he saw like one of the single moms that like is known in the neighborhood like she had them. And I'm like, that's so weird. Like, again, if it's the gray money, I guess, and you want to make some extra cash on the side, like it's a great business. I mean, that's... If we look back at, I think it was the late 90s, early 2000s, we had a similar thing where you could buy some sort of streaming box.

39:46It was a cable box, but it was like a... Like a black box or whatever? Yeah, it was jailbroken. And so you would get free cable. And so this wasn't sold by the moms in the neighborhood. This wasn't sold by your uncle, maybe your uncle. But it was some guy. It was sold in the seedy parts of town. Yeah, exactly. Where you had to know someone who knew someone who knew someone and then make a deal with them to get your pirated, your jailbroken cable box. Yeah. And that's what this doesn't smell the same. This has a different scent to it because the people who are selling it are almost like hustlers in some way.

40:23Yeah, exactly. Where they've got like six side businesses. And they've got a lot of free time. It's like a weird, there's a weird profile overlap that I was noticing because at first it was like real estate agents. I'm like, okay, I could kind of see that. Then I'm seeing reports online where someone's like, oh, my cable guy tried to sell me one. I'm like, your cable guy, like who just installed your internet is trying to sell you one of these boxes? Like what? And then of course, There's the whole issue with just as you're, you know, as we start looking at kind of like the whole thing, I'm like, OK, well, now I'm starting to see like people, like you said, like five, six businesses.

40:59And they're not tech savvy people. They're just like, oh, yeah, it just works. I've been using mine for two years. I don't have any problems, you know. And they're usually the ones that will go into a lot of these social media posts and they say anyone trying to say anything negative about it. Like they're ready to squash any negativity as soon as you try to post about it. The marketing images of this thing is ridiculous. There's one with the family sitting on a couch, which looks like a stock photo and the super box is like oddly placed on the TV in front of them. And the mother is smiling all happy with this thing holding her daughter.

41:29And again, to me, this thing looks like it's targeting suburban families. There's a piece here that I don't think we talk about enough in cyber security. And it's really truly like the cyber psychology of us as consumers as of us as practitioners of everyone, really. And so we don't have a culture of understanding, again, like scams and stuff like we we lose billions of dollars every year to pig butchering, fishing, all kinds of get rich quick schemes like everybody wants to make a buck or everybody thinks that, you know, oh, I'm no longer going to be a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. Like, I'm going to be a millionaire now.

42:07Or I get to watch TV and I don't see what the problem is. Yeah. I was, at first, I was going to push back and say, well, you know, we assume that the stuff we buy has already been vetted and secure and all that stuff. Or else it wouldn't be in the store. Because the store should have some sort of responsibility. There's implied trust when you go to, like, Best Buy. Right? There's a reason I'm not going to go stand out here on the corner and say, hey, does anyone have an iPhone 17 I can just buy real quick? I'm going to go to Apple. I'm going to go directly to Best Buy. And so again, as consumers, especially in the United States, like you said, we go to Best Buy, we assume that what we're getting is okay.

42:47Okay. Well, let me ask you this. Once the FBI warning came out, did all of the stuff evaporate off Best Buy and Walmart? Nope. It's still there. And part of the problem is because they have very unmonitored third-party marketplaces. However, I did receive reports from other contacts that they had a parent that was able to get one off the shelf at Best Buy. What? Which I was like, how did that even happen? Because it's very hard to get things on the shelf at Best Buy. But if there's this other kind of influence of like, hey, let me slide you some cash in this envelope, secondarily put this on the shelf at Best Buy, I can absolutely see that happening.

43:25If we just think about humanity. So, I mean, I want to assume that it did get wiped off of all these online marketplaces, but then it's a cat and mouse game. And so it just comes right back. And there is a different seller selling it. And there's another person and maybe there's tens or dozens or hundreds of people trying to get it back onto Amazon. And since Amazon has this sort of anybody can come on and sell something, then it becomes very hard for Amazon to pop every mole in the head. Like police it, yeah. Okay. So you feel like that's what happened? I think that's probably got a lot to do with it.

43:59I mean, the third party marketplace thing, you know, I still have questions about how how Timu came out of nowhere and got two Super Bowl commercials the first year of its existence. But what yeah, like looking at Amazon, like I did look recently and it's actually harder to find them. So I think Amazon did make some changes. But like Walmart is still just like pages and pages and pages. And again, I mean, they get a lot of money out of having all these sellers on their marketplaces, but they're selling something that's kind of dangerous. Gosh, this device is so insidious in the way it's wriggling into our homes across the nation.

44:34We humans are vulnerable to scams and manipulation, and this seems to be the perfect thing to exploit that. Americans are sick of paying for 20 different streaming services. Like if you pay for Netflix, Disney +, Amazon Prime, and HBO Max, you still don't get any news channels. It's so fractured and crazy. I just remember this YouTube video by Video Game Donkey, who has a guide on how to watch all the seasons of Pokemon. Here, take a listen. For Pokemon, there is a website that tells you how to watch this. You start off on Netflix, then swap over to the Pokemon streaming service, which is the only place that has season two.

45:12Then swap over to Prime Video for seasons three through five. Swap to Freebie, then Hoopla. Season 13 is only on Amazon, though. Then swap to Tubi, then Hulu, then Roku channel. And then finally, back to the Pokemon streaming and then Netflix. Easy. What are these streaming services doing? It's like the more they battle, the more we lose. Like Disney bought Marvel in 2009 for$4 billion, but even Disney Plus doesn't have the rights to play all the Spider-Man movies? What's happening? So this super box hit us right where our pain point is when it comes to watching TV and movies. It solves so many problems.

45:49People don't want a pirate. But when it's so painful and so complicated to find the shows you want to watch, then they just migrate to a simpler way to watch the shows. It's not even less expensive since they're paying$300 or$400 for one of these boxes, which just has all the shows they want to watch. I'm sure they'd be happy paying a monthly fee if it was for a streaming service which gave them what they wanted. But piracy is on the rise because of how complicated and frustrating streaming services are today. And when it's a thousand times easier to pirate a movie than it is to research where things are streamed, only to create an account there, only to find that they're no longer streaming it there, then people are going to give up and just pirate.

46:29Honestly, I blame the streaming services for this explosion of piracy that we're currently seeing. They need to start treating their users with more respect and we'd all be much happier for it. Like I had been hyper-focused on the super box, but then I saw some of the same characteristics of a bunch of sellers and folks on social media talking about the VC box. So again, another one that's like still something, something box, but a lot of the same stuff. Oh, we've got this playback feature. Like, you get all the channels. I'm like, this sounds familiar. And so I start digging into the VC box, and so I buy one of these.

47:07And this thing looks equally as strange. It was another weird Reddit post, too. Reddit was, like, weird and, like, got me all these breadcrumbs, by the way, because people just tell on themselves in, like, Reddit piracy, by the way. But this particular post stuck out to me because they're like, oh yeah, there's no Chinese here. I got this new box and it still gives you all the channels and it's better than the super box. Does it say no Chinese here? It literally says that's the first thing it says. Like they started the post like that. I'm like, what? Like why? And in the thread, no one said anything about China.

47:42Like that's the thing that was weird. I was like, why are you telling on yourself? And so I read this post. This person in particular was like, no, everything was great. My seller was awesome. Everything's responsive. It's the best ever. You should get the VC box now. And I'm like, why is there another one? And so they look like almost competing companies. So I buy one. And it's also beginning straight to like China via Tencent infrastructure. I'm like, I'm not crazy, right? So I put them all on the same network together and they all start talking to each other. Really? Yeah. I was like, oh no.

48:16Are you guys sentient? I'm scared. So again, I continue to dig. I continue to dig. I'm looking again, actually getting access to, I was using census at this point because I started census at the beginning of 2025. What is their tool? Their internet intelligence, internet scanning, like Shodan for grownups. Oh, okay.

48:39Got to do the job. So as I, again, it just continues kind of to get weird. I'm now tracking the different marketing campaigns. I'm tracking, you know, when new models come out And so when I started, the Superbox S5 was the model that was available. And now they're up to the 7. So they're still just releasing with new versions. Wow. I'm like, wow, this one has USB-C on it. Look at them go.

49:09So, yeah. So, again, it's just kind of continued. I got to the kind of towards the end of 2025. 25. And I start seeing more posts about like suspicious activity blocked from users on Reddit, getting, you know, messages about, oh, my ISP says that I'm visiting malicious IPs and things like that. So I'm like, okay, so maybe like there's some traction picking up here because now they're starting to be signals that folks are starting to pick up on this, folks are starting to notice this and make those changes with regard to like our own infrastructure. So I'm still looking. and in the beginning in the beginning of last year I found a third box called the MAGA box MAGA MAGA oh MAGA box like M-A-G-A oh my gosh and that actually finally I got the answer I was looking for just this week from an interesting Verge article I'll talk about here in a second but that one of course stuck out to me because I'm like well who could they possibly be trying to advertise to and I was just like wow, it was so blatant and it looked just like the Superbox.

50:19That's what got me. I'm like, why does it look like the Superbox? I don't understand. So again, there's so many weird things. I'm like, why is this still happening? Just a lot of why this? And did you get one of the MAGA boxes? I did. I don't know if they killed it or what because I hooked it back up recently to put back into my little baby botnet that I'm running at the house and it wasn't getting updates or anything. So something else may be going wrong with that or they've just kind of shifted focus back to the other ones. But yeah, I ran it for a little bit, kind of the same thing, had a weird little, you know, get the little app store, get the little video app, watch your TV shows.

51:00Here's your local listings of channels. They have like, you know, all the different like, you know, fandoms and things that you can get access to, but it worked like the other two. Things come with remotes? They come with remotes. and anything interesting in the remote um they have self-signed certificates for some reason um they of course have microphones but like again they have open ports on them as remotes so i can if i'm looking for super boxes on the internet i can actually see the ports but it's the remote so i still have some some mysteries i'm trying to solve there but i did see it had a long antenna and I'm like, why is that antenna so long if it's just like an infrared remote?

51:42Yeah. Okay. So infrared wouldn't even need an antenna. Exactly. So did you find any, like, do you know what protocols it can handle? I mean, I know it's Bluetooth. My tinfoil hat moment is cellular, but I haven't confirmed that yet. I'm talking to some cellular nerds to see if we can have a way to figure that out. But again, it's very strange because with most of the Android boxes I found. I bought some cheap ones and they just had a generic Android TV remote. Okay. The remotes are specific to the Superbox that it comes with or the VC box that it comes with. You have to use the remote they give you.

52:21And even if you go on, say, Amazon Best Buy, and you look for, say, Superbox remote, it's a specific remote that you can only use with those boxes. It doesn't work with other Android boxes, which is also weird. God, this thing just gets worse and worse. It's like a never-ending nightmare. The remote has a microphone? At this point, I'm certain that that thing must always be on and is listening and maybe even using AI to parse out what's being said in the privacy of our living rooms and bedrooms and sending those conversations to who knows where. Which, the living room is probably the place where you make private phone calls and stuff.

53:00Holy cow. And it interacts with the super box using infrared, So why in the world is there even a Bluetooth antenna on it at all? Look, let me tell you, a lot of us are walking Bluetooth signals. The Bluetooth that's on our phone is always looking to see what it can connect to. And you might have a Bluetooth smartwatch or earbuds. And I've seen pacemakers and hearing aids with Bluetooth. And all this can make quite a fingerprint that's unique to you. I mean, have you ever gone to add a new Bluetooth device and you see things like Diane's earbuds or Bill's fitness tracker? I imagine that this thing is taking notes of what Bluetooth devices come near it so it can tell who's nearby.

53:37And as a side note, to improve my home defense strategy, I recently got a Bluetooth antenna which is just scanning for what Bluetooth devices are near my home, and it records it. My theory is that if someone ever breaks into my home, I'll pull up the logs to see what Bluetooth devices were in range at that point and try to see if they ever visited before to try to figure out who it was. there is a lot of data you can get from sniffing Bluetooth signals. So if this remote has a Bluetooth antenna, a long one at that, and is quite the malicious little box, I can only take guesses as to what it's doing with that antenna.

54:11And keep in mind, it doesn't use Bluetooth as a feature. You can't connect to it that way, and it doesn't try to connect to Bluetooth speakers or anything. The Bluetooth antenna is covertly installed on it and is not user accessible. and then we get to kind of fall 2025 I see you besides Portland I did go to besides in Portland a hacker conference and at that point she's given talks about this box about a half dozen times but because there's a federal investigation going on she has strict rules no cameras, no mics, no recording, no pictures it's very hush hush kind of talk that she gives but it was one of my favorite talks I've ever seen and the crowd was stunned for two hours after the talk, she had a mob of people around her just asking more questions about what she found, and they were giving her information.

55:00I even stood there, perplexed by this whole thing, listening to everyone ask her questions for hours. Everyone thought it was such a fascinating little box. And at this point, this is probably the third or fourth time I've seen her give a talk on this, and it just gets better every single time because there's just more to the story. And every time I would tell her, listen, when you're ready, let's please make an episode. But she was very hesitant, mostly because there's an active investigation. And if she exposes them in a big way, it might ruin the ability to collect more evidence. But at the same time, the story was burning in her.

55:34She wanted to get the word out as a warning to everyone and their parents. Don't buy these things. But she felt worried about it. So she told me, no, not yet, but soon. And then Mr. Krebs reached out to me not too long after that. And he was asking about the Superbox. And so he wrote a really good article that basically broke down kind of the interconnection between the Superboxes and the residential proxy networks. And, you know, I didn't think that the Superbox finding was going to be anything major. I was just kind of like, hey, I wanted to share and come to find out that like all of the residential proxy stuff and the botnet stuff and all that stuff that we're seeing in the news, a lot of that were breakthroughs because of what we all discovered looking at streaming devices.

56:18Like we hadn't considered them a true vector. until recently. So when she says Mr. Krebs, she's talking about Brian Krebs, the journalist behind Krebs on Security. How'd you feel about that article? You know what? I thought, I mean, I didn't say anything factually incorrect in the article, so there was that. No, I think it was a good article because I think that was kind of another big push to kind of just show awareness. Some awesome folks also got quoted in that article, folks from Spur and things like that who also specialize in like proxy networks and stuff like that. That's what they hunt.

56:52And so it was really cool to kind of see this amalgamation of all the different little pieces that all of us were looking at and then kind of seeing the full picture and having it explained in an approachable way. Because when you're sitting here listening to me talking about this, you're like, oh my God, this is so much stuff. I'm like, I know. But there's like a lot of this other stuff that kind of builds up to sort of these major events that we've had happened in the last 60 days, just, you know, beginning of 2026 and end of 2025. So the Krebs article comes out and then I get phished, or at least someone tried to phish me.

57:24Because when Mr. Krebs published that article, another IoT researcher got a super box and started finding some cool stuff. And there was a posting of the store itself, like the repo they were using was just kind of out there. When it started to get bigger on YouTube, because of Matt Brown's work, all of the sudden, the store is not there. It's not you can't find the repo anymore. Then I get this email saying, hey, do you have like, you know, the app store dumps? Do you have some TCP dump? But I'm like, first of all, it's a very personal question. Like, you don't just, you know, start off asking for people's TCP dump logs, like, come on.

58:03But I'm like, holy crap. And it's, of course, coming from a ProtonMail. They said they were a computer science student, but they're not emailing me from an academic email. And they emailed me at my academic email where I adjunct that I don't put out anywhere. And I was like, how the hell did you get this? Number one. Number two. Wow. Like that was a that was a hard nudge trying to kind of sniff around and see what was going on. So, of course, I didn't answer. I was just like, no. And then I got a LinkedIn phishing message too, asking about, we want to see your Superbox research. We work at ISP.

58:38I'm like, that's the tell. Like there's certain things that give away these folks. And so obviously the stuff that I've been working on and looking at this, like this is making somebody a lot of money. So I'm sure they don't want me going around telling people not to buy the Superbox. But here's me just blanket saying, don't buy the Superbox. and so a lot of interesting points have been kind of interested in kind of what I've been finding and where I got. So after that happened, I got DDoSed at my house. What? Yeah.

59:14That was wild. Externally coming from the internet to you. Yeah. How in the world would anybody know your IP? Well, I don't think, I think in the very, very beginning, and I've changed ISPs too, which I thought was kind of hilarious that I still got hit. But again, depending on who's behind it, I mean, they probably have more resources than I do. So they, I mean, if they really wanted to know, they can probably find out. But yeah, I got nailed like pretty bad. How long, what did it last? I think it was like 15 minutes. Like we couldn't like, like nothing would play, nothing would stream. Like I was actually on a signal voice call with like a friend and it was like all choppy, like more so than usual because signal voice can be like hit or miss anyway.

59:54But it was like really bad. I'm like, holy crap. Like I can't even talk to you. And did you look at the Palo Alto and it was telling you? Oh yeah. It was just like just over, over, over. Like it was just, it was like three pages worth of just this one IP. I looked it up. It was in like Ireland. I'm like, okay, well that's not, it was in Cloudflare. I'm like, okay, well, I don't know who the hell did it right now. But yeah, I was more upset that like, you know, my husband was watching Spaceballs and like that totally got paused because of this DDoS attack. So yeah, I was like, wow, I made a new friend.

1:00:26I got DDoSed at the house. So this brings us into January of 2026. And around then we saw the largest botnet DDoS attack ever. It was the Kim Wolf botnet, and it was launching attacks at 31 terabits per second. It basically had control of 2 million devices and could tell them all to send traffic to a specific IP on the internet, which would basically flood any computer with so much traffic that it would knock it offline. And you think the super boxes were part of that botnet? They were confirmed as part of that botnet. But here's the thing. From my understanding, it wasn't the makers of Superbox who were involved at all in this botnet.

1:01:07These things shipped with a really old version of Android and are loaded with all kinds of remote access features like TeamViewer, Netcat, and stuff. So the person behind the KimWolf botnet simply found how vulnerable these Superboxes were and spread their botnet onto a ton of them. So now this guy Dort, who's the one who made the KimWolf botnet, controls the Superboxes. I mean, if I wasn't already extremely concerned about who's in these super boxes listening, now there's Dort in there too, and who knows what he's doing with these things, turning them into weapons, I guess. And if Dort can get into any super box that's on the internet, then does that mean anyone else can get into these things too?

1:01:43Like, are there a dozen spies in these things listening to us, seeing what we're doing on our microphones and stuff and poking around on our networks? Gosh, I was telling someone about this the other day, and their first incident is that the CIA must be in there listening too. And you know what? At this point, I don't doubt it. The fact that these super boxes are getting infected with more malware by random people on the internet just makes it so much worse. So at this point, it doesn't even matter if China's behind this, because pretty much anyone can take these things over and eavesdrop on us.

1:02:11Or use the device to attack someone else with. This thing is radioactive, and it should be smashed, burned, and yeeted into space. Cloudflare, you know, put out a report that talks about kind of the DDoS statistics for the year for 2025. and they said that the Asuru Kim Wolf botnet was the busiest and they mitigated, I think the number was crazy, like over 2 ,000 attacks they mitigated originating from this botnet. I'm like, wow, so it's been busy. Basically, the Kim Wolf botnet is a DDoS as a service business. You can pay them money and then they'll aim this botnet wherever you want, the target of your choice, and it'll take down whatever you tell them to.

1:02:48So it's purely profit-driven for whoever's behind it. But did this box try to communicate with other devices on the network? Yeah. Internally? Yeah. So I had my two little sacrificial Raspberry Pis, as I call them. I was like, well, once you've touched this network, you can never go back anywhere else. So thank you, my little lambs. And so the Raspberry Pis sit there on the network. And I didn't even name them anything interesting. But I'm looking. I've got TCP dump running on them. And the boxes are just going freaking crazy. All of them are just actively trying to poke at it. I'm watching scanning.

1:03:22I'm like, are you guys ed mapping this like little Raspberry Pi in here? Like what the hell? Again, they're doing that discovery when they get on a network to see what's on the network. So if you're working, say from home, and maybe you're in a position of trust, you're in some type of like important position or you have like, you know, privileged credentials, things like that. You have this thing sitting on your network and don't know like what it's potentially doing. It could be sniffing creds every time you log into work. It could be discovering your work device on your home network because a lot of folks don't have any segmentation on their home networks.

1:03:56I mean, you know, the possibilities really are endless if we think about it as just like an attack tool. I did get a report from someone that there was one at a remote employee's house that was actively trying to poke stuff on their corporate network. Okay, so do they have a VPN between their home and corporate network? Uh-huh. Hmm. Gosh, this thing is bad. I still cannot get over how it scans your house, attacks the devices on your network, knocks them offline and impersonates them. Ah, this is such a nightmare. It's like a perfect Trojan horse, like in the traditional sense. Like, we go back to the original story.

1:04:35Here's this big present and we're going to hide inside. Here's this device that lets you get all the channels and somebody is going to hide inside. Okay, fair. It solves a ton of problems for people and that's the big reason why they want to get it. But my gosh, at this point, the veil is lifted. We can see the spies are inside of it. And I'm glad that word is out now, right? And that means that there's enough information that everyone should be extremely careful and not buy these things and should be clear that nobody should get this thing because it's just pure evil, right? Earlier this week, an article comes out on The Verge.

1:05:09And I'm like, oh, The Verge. And it's talking about the super box and the VC box. And basically, and you know, I'm a big wrestling fan. So, you know, we call it getting over or putting someone else over. It's basically trying to put over the super box and say like, oh, well, like, you know, there's people at the farmer's market selling these and, you know, they've also got like some goat cheese and stuff. So they're just trying to make it. And like, this guy was a retired cop in upstate New York. And now he's trying to help, you know, his church get access to quality television. And I'm reading this like, Like, this is literal propaganda.

1:05:43Like, oh my goodness. Like, this is what they mean when they say, like, it's going to be plain as day in your face. And you're not going to understand that, like, again, an average everyday person is going to read that and be like, oh, well, these people don't care. Like, in the article, like, it verbatim said, like, oh, I don't care about sending a couple thousand dollars a month to China every month because I, you know, I'm helping people get affordable TV. Sorry. I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. What? This Verge article is titled, Everyone is Stealing TV. And yeah, it simply talks about how so many Americans are selling and using these things.

1:06:22Like they interviewed Jason and Natalie and James and Eva. All who are happy Superbox users and resellers. The quote from Eva is, I've been on a crusade to try to convert everyone. I'm completely flabbergasted by this article. Like, what are we even doing? I mean, let me read one part to you. They interviewed this guy, Jason, who earns a commission for every Superbox he sells. After signing him up as a reseller, Jason's Superbox contact also recruited him for a unique side gig. Whenever Jason finds a Superbox advertised for less than the company's suggested retail price, he buys it and sells it back to the company for a premium.

1:06:59He says that the Superbox maker then checks the device's MAC address against a list of past sales and remotely deactivates all boxes it sold to the reseller who openly advertised the unauthorized discount. Offending sellers are then asked to pay a fine, Jason says. Consumers who happen to buy a box for the wrong price find it locked, with an on-screen warning telling them to contact their service provider. To alleviate the concerns of would-be buyers fearful of getting scammed, device makers maintain online verification tools. Each reseller gets a certificate with a unique code. Enter that code into a web form, and the company will tell you if the reseller in question is in good standing.

1:07:37Oh, thanks, Virge, for squashing my concerns about being scammed by someone selling me a cheap super box. I feel much better now that you told me that there's an online verification tool to check whether this seller is legit or not. This article, in my opinion, is all hype for this thing. It doesn't raise any of the red flags that I see on it. I simply cannot believe The Verge posted this article. This is ridiculous. I am officially nominating this article for a pony award. Then yesterday, there was like, I think it was called like the Tech Brew Ride Home or something like that. At the end of the episode from yesterday, he spends about five minutes and he's basically, it sounds like he's reading The Verge article.

1:08:25And I'm like, no, like, don't, don't repeat it. Like, we were already, again, they're already trying to discredit any of the research that any of us have done on this to basically prove that, like, this isn't something you should be getting. And what cracked me up is in the article, it said, well, it's not like you can get these at Walmart and Best Buy because everyone knows it's illegal to have pirate devices at the store. And I'm like, no shit, but they're at Walmart and Best Buy. And I don't think you understand how crazy it is to have an influencer marketing campaign working against us here.

1:08:59You're not buying these things from some shady guy in a dark alley who you know is 100 % illegal and is probably scamming you. You're buying it from a soccer mom, a guy with a stand at the farmer's market, your church friend, family members, gym buddies, coworkers. And when it comes into your life in this way, it doesn't feel illegal. It doesn't seem shady. It feels like you're clever and smart to get such a cool gadget. I remember, you know, kind of the old adage, like, you know, back in the 90s, early aughts, like, especially all of us who've been on the internet a long time, and those of us who were like in high school and stuff like that, when in the early days of the internet, you know, you felt like you could spot a scam from a mile away because the skill wasn't there.

1:09:39But this is sophisticated. Like, again, they're hitting it from a few different angles. They're making sure that they have people ready to counter any negative, like, press or posts or anything like that. They're making sure, like we've said, to tap into the economic anxiety. Like, it's crazy. I'm like, wow, they've put so much time into this. But then you think about where these things end up. I mean, you know, you know people that work weird shifts or maybe they work in like, you know, some kind of weird office. It's boring at night. Maybe they're on graves. Oh, I want to watch the UFC fight.

1:10:13Let me bring my super box.

1:10:18And then that thing just gets busy devouring all the computers at work. Or it's brought to a hotel to watch TV on the go. Or maybe the coffee shop owner installed one so they could play shows on the TVs in the shop. And now when you get on the Wi-Fi in that shop, suddenly you're on the same network as a computer that's probing and scanning you and attacking you. This is why I never use Wi-Fi in a coffee shop or a public place. I just picture it riddled with these diseased, infected boxes that are desperately trying to get access to my machine the moment it connects. I bring my own Wi-Fi hotspot with me everywhere I go, so I only trust my own network.

1:10:55The funniest thing I think that has happened so far was being out at a pho restaurant. And, you know, I'm looking around because someone had just told me they were at a pho restaurant and saw three of them in there. so now I like go into places that I'm like looking and making sure there's not like a super box behind the tv and stuff like that because even if it's not doing anything else just the fact that like anything you connect to it it wants to know about it and it's going to start poking at it to me is scary like if I connect my phone like and what what made me upset about this whole situation with my dad is like I went over there and didn't know he had these and had connected like my work computer at the time and like my phone and stuff to the home network because I was visiting for a couple days.

1:11:36And I'm like, you have these things in the house? These have been plugged in the whole time? Like, what? And so it exposes all of us in a lot of ways that we may not want to be exposed. And, you know, I'm not doing anything shady, but like, I want my privacy. And I saw you are bringing a Faraday bag with you everywhere you go. Is this why? I mean, it could have something to do with it for sure. But also just trying to be more cognizant of my own like personal security hygiene because I think for a lot of us that have been doing this for a while there's always gonna be places where we're just like I don't just I just don't care that much because we already we're already in it so much all the time but I spent some time kind of reflecting on you know I was out traveling um and I think I got popped with something because my phone was acting crazy and all this other stuff so I blew away everything in the house re-imaged everything everything's fine now but I'm like I'm just gonna take some extra steps just to make sure because I usually, you know, I always have VPNs on and stuff like that.

1:12:34But, you know, a VPN can only do so much if somebody is really interested in what you've got going on on the other side of that. So yeah, I will just encourage everyone to just keep practicing basic security hygiene because the moment we get complacent, that's usually when we get got. Okay, that's it. I'm taking dead asses cue here. If she always keeps her phone in a Faraday bag, I think I have to do that now too. A Faraday bag is one that just doesn't let wireless signals pass in and out of it. Think of it like the door of your microwave, which blocks it so your microwave doesn't cook the whole kitchen.

1:13:04Because who knows what coffee shops and restaurants have these things in them and are scanning my phone even if I'm not connected to the Wi-Fi. Like, what's with the Bluetooth and other antennas on this thing? It's proven to be so malicious that I don't trust it for a second. I don't even want to be in range of this thing. Let's put all the pieces together. Yeah. And where do you land on this? Okay. So the whole picture is somebody, and I'm going to be vague on purpose because I am still working to get the full picture of the somebody. Somebody is basically getting influencers, of course, to show these.

1:13:35There's an entire distribution network of distributors and resellers. So they're getting folks, you know, in their neighborhoods and in their communities and, you know, all these places to sell these boxes to friends, family, everybody, as much as they can, which again, already weird. They've already infiltrated all the big box stores. So again, it's now looks like this normal everyday has been around for nine years consumer product. We still, of course, have the whole issue with them targeting people directly in oil and gas, which that's still, to me, I'm like, this got mailed to you at your house, friend?

1:14:10Like, are you gonna move? Like, I just, you know, I'm worried for you. And then we still, of course, just have the endless problem of like, there's no like legitimate, like regulatory tracking on it. They're dark. There's no FCC IDs. You can't find really any information on these things. The one that we did find information on, when you're importing something and it's coming from overseas, you have to sign off on it and say that everything's correct. It's labeled. It's got the FCC ID, things like that. And it had a signed one. But the name did not... It was a QQ email that signed it. And I'm like, so the U.S.

1:14:51agent has a QQ.com email signing off on this device that it has all the regulatory information and the things it's supposed to have when it doesn't. That's not legit. Yeah. So it's kind of like they've got us like on the MLM thing, too. Like, I don't know what it is about America. And we love our MLMs, man. Like, there's been like, you know, Amway and all the, you know, there was even like a power one. So this is just like a new MLM. It's just Dreamy Box MLM, it seems like. Yeah, and I think they're hitting us in such a unique way because they know we're frustrated with the rising cost of cable and all the different streaming services are branching off into their own.

1:15:30So now you have to have 10 different streaming subscriptions and people are sick of this. So they're just like, we got the solution for you. It's perfect. You get all the channels. And we don't care about breaking the law. Exactly. Yeah, so someone is doing this. Do you have an idea who might be behind this? I mean, given everything that's going on geopolitically, of course, everyone was kind of just like, hands up like China. It just seems like it's obvious right at this point because why else would it be beaconing straight into Tencent? The other thing too is that as I've kind of been looking at this and everything else, the devices themselves, they've got a whole manufacturing arm that has to be...

1:16:12Again, China's gotten the manufacturing thing down. We're all sitting around with iPhones and all these other things. like China makes our stuff. So they've gotten really good at how to fabricate this stuff. And so it actually looks nice. Like it looks like it's good quality to make it look even more credible for the price that people are paying. And if we think about, like you said, everyone's stressed out for money. Everybody always wants a quick fix. We are such suckers for get rich quick schemes and things like that. And that is like peak multi-level marketing. The distributors get a cut from the resellers.

1:16:47The resellers get a cut from the boxes. And then if you get friends to also help you resell, you get more of a cut of their boxes. So it's a perfect MLM. So they're hitting us from the things that are built into our culture, TV, multi-level marketing, get rich quick. They're building into our economic anxiety. They're building into our complacency with just accepting things that even if we don't know that much about it, it's like, oh, well, we get all our stuff from Walmart or all our stuff from Best Buy. Yeah, social proof. Yeah. So they're hitting us from a few different angles, just psychologically, like not even from a technical perspective, like the tactics and everything that the box are using.

1:17:25Those are like table stakes, like you expect reconnaissance, you expect some of these other things. You don't expect an influencer network that's trying to get these out there. You don't expect there to be marketing. Because if you look at some of the other devices, like there might be one or two videos here and there, like maybe talking about like an Nvidia Shield as an example. But this thing has like a whole campaign, websites and everything else. I'm like, who is doing like you set up a whole brand just to sell these things like this is insane. And so yeah, all that to say, like, we're now at this point where I'm like, okay, well, we have to make a decision, I guess, as like a nation.

1:18:04Do we want cheap, easy cable? Or do we want to continue to have basically back doors plugged into all of our networks. Okay, so if it is China, even the Chinese government, it's crazy to think that the Chinese government would be behind this, but it sounds like it may be. They have that unified front as far as integrating everything with the military. Sure. So if the Chinese government is trying to get into Americans' homes in order to gain more access into them and visibility and all that sort of things, it doesn't seem like we'd be their first target. So I'm just wondering if there is a, if we've seen this activity in other countries, these kind of boxes show up in other countries.

1:18:49Yeah, that was kind of interesting because I kind of like immediately, you know, when I first started looking at it, of course I wanted to see if there was anything else that had been reported. There was a researcher, I'm spacing on his name right now, but he had done a write-up on the malware that was in the T95 box. So that kind of got me already thinking like, okay, so we have seen behavior similar to this before. I did look in other countries and stuff, and China had already cracked down on these types of device. I think New Zealand had already cracked down on these types of devices. So it seems like this had already been a similar problem, but apparently there was also a similar campaign in Taiwan about 10-ish years ago.

1:19:29It was all centered around illegal piracy of sports. And so it was the same idea, though. They had these streaming boxes that were convenient, and you could get all the sports channels, and they were all over Taiwan. And then they got busted, and then they weren't all over Taiwan anymore. But that could have been a test bed to then see, okay, well, how do we make it work here? So how does a country bust them so that it's no longer valid in that country or whatever? What are the even approach to stop something like this? I mean, they, of course, were like, you got to pull them off the shelves. They're banned.

1:20:03Like, they can't be imported. You know, those big kid controls, as I like to call them. I don't know how long it's going to take to even see that here. We did just finally get some stuff taken off the shelf that, again, we all had concerns about China. We all had concerns about, like, you know, what are these devices actually doing? But it was, like, years after the fact when it was already a problem. Yeah. I mean, even if you did get it banned from Walmart and Amazon and Best Buy, you still have the soccer mom down the road slinging them. Exactly. And your electrician coming over and saying, I got some extra stuff for you if you want to buy these things.

1:20:40Man, yeah. And so it would be really hard to put the genie back in the bottle at this point. So that's one prong. And then maybe another prong is getting ISPs to do something and say, hey, this is illegal streaming. So we don't allow that here. Yeah. And the ISPs have been really good about this. I actually got word from a friend who works on an ISP. And he says that a lot of users are reporting that their allocated bandwidth is getting maxed out super early in their billing cycle. And they're like, I'm not online that much. Yet it says I've uploaded 360 gigabytes of data. clearly you have a faulty meter.

1:21:16So the ISP technicians go out to the house and investigate, and they can't find an issue, and so they swap out their ISP devices and reset their bandwidth usage. But then the problem persists. Next month, the customers call back saying, it shows that I've uploaded so much data that my ISP is now throttling me. One customer was even seen uploading 4 ,000 gigabytes in a single day. So the ISP asks the customers, by chance, do you have a super box? and many of them say, yeah, I do. Why? Well, it's because those things are sending enormous amounts of data to the internet. But what is it sending? Sure, it's part of a botnet, so it's attacking other devices by sending floods of data, but also it just might be exfiltrating tons of data that it's collecting in that home network.

1:22:01Voice logs, network data, photos, files, anything that it might find valuable. It just sucks it up and sends it off. I mean, And if a device is sending terabytes of data a day or a month, then the question isn't what is it uploading? It's more like what isn't it uploading? So, yeah, ISPs are getting hit in the face with these boxes, too, and are unsure how to effectively handle them. I think the telecom and ISP networks understand, I think, their vulnerabilities a little bit better. They're like, OK, yeah, we actually have to look at what is going on in home networks because we are no longer at the point where we can just pretend, oh, well, it's consumer.

1:22:37that doesn't impact me. We're all in it now. Like you said, we can't put the genie back in the bottle. So they've been pretty good about trying to, of course, sinkhole traffic. So ISPs can, of course, see downstream. But we have to kind of think about like, are we prepared to be a country where we are now policing what's going on on home networks? And obviously, like, that would be problematic for a lot of people. Yeah, I think that's going too far. No, right. No, exactly. I don't think we should have to do that. This might be the one time that I want Disney to get litigious. Yeah, right. Because why hasn't Disney figured out, hey, they're streaming this pirating.

1:23:16Because I know that they've always been really anti-this. The mouse is always ready to strike when it comes to that stuff. I'm actually really surprised that it hasn't been one of these bigger media companies actually striking back. I mean, Google sued the bad box operators. Okay. And there was a bunch of DMCA notices and stuff like that, but it's still going. so is that going to actually do what we want it to do? I don't know. Like we still, you know, so much has happened in the last couple of weeks that like it's going to be a busy year in 2026. That's all I can really say. Like it's, there's so much more that's going to come from this.

1:23:55I guarantee it. Yeah. And it seems like so easy for it to just be eliminated since it is illegal. and that's the thing I'm just surprised I've been stuck on that honestly to me I'm just like this is the most blatant example of this and like y 'all are out here sending like these you know ISP letters to like a single mom because she wanted to like download Shrek 2 for like her kids but like we're not doing anything about this entire network of bootleg streaming that's what's so surprising is the pushback on piracy all these years and how terrible it's been to torrent things and how people are Yeah, we're all evil trash for...

1:24:39Apparently, that's not a problem anymore. Or they haven't got the memo. That's what's surprising about it. Yeah. And so that's what I think is going to unravel this year. It's no longer unknown. Yeah. And it's like, okay, this is clearly... Because if it is allowed, then why don't we just make a... A legit one. Not a legit one, but a non-malicious one. Like we could have a whole new business model, man. And again, I'm surprised someone just hasn't, right? Like I won't be surprised when somebody is like, hey, I'm ethical and I'm going to help you get all the channels. Like here comes everyone else's money because we don't want implant devices.

1:25:19But again, there's just a lot all going on at the same time. Like obviously, like when we think about the whole geopolitical picture, there's a lot of different moving pieces. We've seen a lot of stuff overseas, internationally. And so I still am trying to understand how this might even be a part of that. So I will be digging more this year. That's for sure. Oh, yeah. I mean, I hope that the update, whatever comes next, isn't these bad boxes destroyed America. Yeah. Oh, my God. It is. You're right. Like I said, if you're putting in this is a pre-positioning move, what is their final intent? And maybe we don't know yet.

1:25:58And that's what I, yeah, that's the part that I'm still kind of scratching my head about. Like, it's just, it's the why. I mean, I'm like, yeah, I guess like maybe the ad fraud, maybe it's the, you know, residential proxy business they're running. Maybe it's just the botnet. But like, there's so many other ways to do all of that. That's not stand up a whole brand and then market these boxes to people so they buy them. Yeah. I predict that we haven't seen the full wrath of what these things are capable of yet. It's possible that all this is just some pre-positioning move of some kind. And whoever's behind this is trying to get blue-collar workers to give them access into U.S.

1:26:38corporations. And then what? If someone gets a hold of our critical infrastructure in a large-scale way, it's like having a chokehold on us. They could do whatever they wanted. So the potential damage these things could do could feasibly be in the realm of nation toppling. Does that make me crazy to say that? This is the very reason why I don't like getting into politics. Politics is designed to confuse you and to keep you from getting to the truth so you can never be sure of what's actually happening. But even when you get a glimpse of the truth, you then sound like a lunatic when you start telling other people because if I ever see one of these things plugged in anywhere, I'm going to immediately unplug it and try smashing it to bits.

1:27:18And I can only imagine the owner of it yelling at me, Hey, what are you doing, man? And I'd be like, don't you know this thing is evil? And if we don't stop it, it might be the end of our nation. I feel like a lunatic just thinking that scenario through. But maybe this is the new world that I just need to get used to. Because even if we all team up to get these things smashed and burned and yeeted once and for all, there's just going to be another thing that pops up. A 3D printer with spyware, a drone with spyware, a projector with spyware, a router, a computer, or even a car. Because if these things are cheaper or better than the competition, or if they just have a better marketing campaign by paying influencers to spread it, then this battle to discover it and eradicate it is just going to start all over again.

1:28:06And I'm not sure it's possible to fix this. And that's what makes it so scary. The whole goal of information security is to conduct business in a hostile environment. Like for instance, when you do anything online, you're traveling through a bunch of networks that you have no idea who owns them. So you have to operate in a zero-trust kind of way by encrypting your connections so that they can't snoop on you and doing things to verify that they didn't tamper with the message. So maybe this is the new hostile environment that we need to learn how to operate safely in. Our homes and workplaces, our coffee shops and bars, could all be out against us now.

1:28:45I never expected our home networks to be hostile environments. But let's take this as a sign that they probably are. And spring is here now, so it's time to clean up our networks and make them safe again. I'm drawing a line on my front door. Spyware is not allowed past this point.

1:29:13Thank you so much to Deadass for finally sharing this story with us. It has been such a treat watching her progress through this over the years, and I'm so happy to finally tell you all about it. Hey, listen, I've got some big things cooking up this year. I'm going to be releasing a new bonus episode real soon here, which is going to only be available to premium subscribers, and I'm also going to be releasing a whole new podcast later this year. This is by far the most insane story anyone has ever told me, and it's taken me eight years to make, and it's finally in its final touches. But premium subscribers are going to get to listen to it way earlier than everyone else.

1:29:54What I'm saying is I really want you to become a premium subscriber. So you just let me know what it is I need to do in order for you to buy me a cup of coffee once a month. Not even 1 % of you are premium subscribers. So I know it's not you. It's me. I need to do something to amaze you or wow you or give you something that you can't find anywhere else. So you just let me know what is it that I can say or do. So you chuck me a few bucks for what I bring you. And if you're like, oh, Jack, you've given me enough. Now it's time for me to give to you. Then thank you. I really appreciate that. You can become a premium subscriber by going to plus.darknetdiaries.com.

1:30:30And you'll get ad-free episodes and a bunch of bonus episodes. and you'll be the first to listen to my new podcast coming out in a few months. The show is created by me, the failed pro gamer, Jack Recyder. Our editor is AI's worst nightmare, Tristan Ledger. Mixing done by Proximity Sound and our intro music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. What's a pirate's favorite movie? Anything rated R. This is Darknet Diaries.