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Alan Pope: "Multiple genuine-looking scam cryptocurrency miners and fake Bitcoin wallet applications have been published in the Snap store since 2018." (popey.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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I used a sentence from the article as the title since I felt it represented the actual issue better, let me know if I should change it.

Essentially, Snap Store has basically no restrictions on publishing new applications, allowing for scammers to impersonate legitimate applications. In this case (and several times in the past) the target was a cryptocurrency wallet, resulting in ~$490,000 worth of bitcoin being stolen.

The "Safe" rating reminds me of this xkcd:

If someone steals my laptop while I'm logged in, they can read my email, take my money, and impersonate me to my friends, but at least they can't install drivers without my permission.

(For comparison, it seems being proprietary is an automatic unsafe rating for any application, which could be considered too extreme in the other direction.)

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[–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

For comparison, I wonder how vulnerable Flathub (flatpak's primary repo) is to these kinds of manipulations... Seems like every app manifest there is publicly available and is compiled on their servers, presumably making it easier to spot shady apps and updates, and the submission process requires manual approval.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 years ago

    Another thing that they do that should make the process less vulnerable is they try to get developers involved in packaging their own applications (and have a verified badge, though I'm not sure how rigorous their verification is).

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