Saturday, 17 August 2013

Hacking?

We have had some wierd experiences with Amazon and Kindle recently.

A week or so ago, Anita bought a Spanish-English dictionary for her kindle app on her Galaxy Note.  The thing is, she could not see the resulting eBook from her Note, anywhere - not on the cloud nor on the device.  However by using a normal web browser to access her online account, the book became visible.  After a couple of lengthy conversations with Amazon tech support, a new version of the software was released that solved the problem.

In due course this new software loaded itself onto my tablet PC, a Google Nexus.   I didn't pay it much attention, but this morning, on using the Kindle software on this device to idly browse the books I have in the Amazon cloud, my attention was attracted by two books that I didn't think I had bought.  One was " A Modern Chinese-English Dictionary" and the other I have no idea because the characters were in what appeared to be Chinese.

I went to my account online and the books were not listed there, so I couldn't delete them.

While I was fiddling about on my Nexus, I attempted to delete these books, and in doing so, I started a download.  By this time I am a bit suspicious, so I attempted to stop the download.  Although the book seemed to stop downloading, two files with chinese names appeared to be continuing to download.  This is starting to look dodgy.  I turned off the Tablet and re-started it and the downloads stopped.

I uninstalled the Kindle app, and re-installed it and the chinese books are now nowhere to be seen.

I think it's possible that someone might have been trying to hack my tablet.  My suspicious mind is telling me that what I think I have observed is entirely consistent with a hacker planting a fake book in my Kindle database on the tablet, and that this book, once I start to download it, attempts to download and install some kind of trojan horse or other malicious software on my device.

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OK, following some contact with Kindle, this looks like some wierd effect related to the fact that Kindle comes complete with 5 dictionaries, including, I guess, a chinese one.  Normally you can't see them in the book list, so when they appear it looks odd.   I'm really not too sure about the second book though - it had no English text in the title at all.  Perhaps it was a thai - chinese dictionary or something






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