About this Event
LSU Cyber Lecture Series
Res Proxies and your Sketchy Friend
Join Ashley Sequeira (aka D3ada55), Head of Intelligence at Clarifi Technologies, for an inside look at how inexpensive Android TV boxes and everyday consumer devices can become part of criminal botnets and residential proxy networks. Through a real-world investigation of a popular “unlocked” streaming device, uncover hidden remote access, compromised firmware, and preinstalled software that allows outside parties to control devices and exploit home networks. From suspicious network activity to firmware analysis and public disclosure, discover how these devices operate, why they're valuable to cybercriminals, and practical ways to identify compromised devices on your network.
Free and open to all!
ABSTRACT
For about $300, you can buy a streaming box that promises every channel, every movie and every live game, with no subscription. What the box doesn’t mention is that it ships with root ADB open to the internet, a fake Google Pixel identity, and an app that turns your home network into part of someone else’s infrastructure.
This talk follows a live investigation into one of the best-selling “unlocked” Android TV boxes on the market. It starts with the first strange connection on a home network. From there we dump and pick apart the firmware, and find a build that exposes ADB on a non-standard port by design. It has never received a security patch, and it spoofs a Pixel 3 fingerprint to get past Google’s certification checks. We then catch the box in the act. Multiple outside parties hold simultaneous root sessions on it, one of them clearly automated from a datacenter, and a preinstalled app sweeps peer lists of other infected boxes across residential networks to build a P2P mesh.
From there, we follow the money and the infrastructure. We look at how the vendor app store, the OTA update channel and the “free TV” business model fit together, and why a cheap device sitting behind your router is worth so much to the people running it.
Attendees will leave with:
A repeatable method for researching cheap consumer hardware: firmware extraction, build.prop and partition analysis, APK reversing and traffic capture
Practical indicators for spotting compromised devices on a network
An inside look at how a real investigation goes from first anomaly to public disclosure, including the research that ended up on Krebs on Security and Darknet Diaries.
SPEAKER BIO
Ashley(Aka, D3ada55) is a hacker and independent security researcher who studies the hidden infrastructure inside everyday consumer devices. Their work centers on the cheap Android TV boxes, IoT gadgets and “plug-and-play” electronics that quietly end up as nodes in criminal botnets and residential proxy networks.
D3ada55 started out taking hardware apart to see how it worked, and that curiosity grew into a research practice.
Her research has been featured on Krebs on Security, and her story was told on Darknet Diaries ep. 172, the podcast about the people behind real-world hacking, “for uncovering an information warfare campaign preinstalled on millions of streaming devices.
D3ada55 brings an academic approach to hacking. She treats every investigation as an experiment: reproducible, evidence-driven and published so others can build on it. She is a strong advocate for students and newcomers, and believes that some of the most important security research starts with a cheap device, a laptop, and the question “what’s this thing actually doing?”
Event venue & nearby stays
LSU Digital Media Center, 340 East Parker Boulevard, Baton Rouge, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.