Google's shut down a security risk from Videostrong devices

So rewind a few years, and before Smart TVs became a big thing, you'd see most of 'streaming' being done with these AndroidTV boxes.  They were pretty sketchy from the ones I remember, and lots of people bought them just so they could run Kodi.

Turns out sketchy only begins to describe one such manufacturer, over the past while Google had noticed, and with the feds help, to isolate that Videostrong had put into many of its devices it built malicious code into the device to turn these devices into a botnet.

The drawback from Android being such open-source is that it practically lets just about anyone use it and adapt it (within reason) for their needs.  The 'within reason' is the important bit, you can't just do anything you want, and putting in backdoor software so you can steal information to be shared with criminals would be top of the 'no-no' list.

Estimates are saying it's like over 1 billion devices.

Source:  https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/shutting-the-door-on-the-xcpe-botnet/