US government-funded phones come pre-installed with unremovable malware

Re:US government-funded phones come pre-installed with unrem... by SlowRobotAhead on Friday January 10, 2020 @11:11PM (#22018066)

> The only difference between the two codes are their variable names. The more discernible variant of this malware uses Chinese characters for variable names. Therefore, we can assume the origin of this malware is China.

I mean... that’s possible and not an unlikely scenario - I guess. But it’s hardly anything but an anecdote. If I was a Russian or American hacker, I would have Chinese variable names swapped out with mine before I released the code.

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Re:US government-funded phones come pre-installed with unrem... by whitecream on Friday January 10, 2020 @11:20PM (#22018102)

For what it's worth, if the image they used is representative of the other variable names they found, then that line of reasoning doesn't make sense - the names are just gibberish characters in Chinese, and some even have random radicals and other characters thrown in. This seems more like the type of strings you get when you take a bunch of random valid UCS-2 code points.

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Re:US government-funded phones come pre-installed with unrem... by jtl999 on Saturday January 11, 2020 @12:13AM (#22018289)

Pretty sure I've seen Chinese or other "strange" characters as an artifact of certain code obfuscation in the past.

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Re:US government-funded phones come pre-installed with unrem... by perl4ever on Saturday January 11, 2020 @12:33AM (#22018352)

I had an issue on my Windows computer with some UTF-something text displaying as Chinese characters a while back...

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