Technology

37706 readers

287 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

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 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It’s not all bad. If the alternative is downloading binaries from a website then confined snaps are a great way to get software.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Snaps are not confined, they're root-level system add-ons.

Flatpacks are slightly confined, they still get access to user data.

Android 10+ apps are confined, they have to ask for particular directory access... and users can still mess up and give them access to all their data. 🤷

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Classic snaps are not and a lot of snaps are classic. That much is true. Some snaps are indeed confined though. See https://snapcraft.io/docs/snap-confinement