- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
If you have the Brave Browser installed on your Windows devices, then you may also have Brave VPN services installed on the machine. Brave installs these services without user consent on Windows devices.
Brave Firewall + VPN is an extra service that Brave users may subscribe to for a monthly fee. Launched in mid-2022, it is a cooperation between Brave Software, maker of Brave Browser, and Guardian, the company that operates the VPN and the firewall solution. The firewall and VPN solution is available for $9.99 per month.
OK… challenge accepted. Maybe you don’t know about systemd user services.
Content of
mytrojan.sh
:#!/usr/bin/env bash echo "Writing the service unit file" cat > ~/.config/systemd/user/my_test_service.service << EOF [Unit] Description=Script Daemon For Test User Services [Service] Type=simple User= #Group= ExecStart=/home/user/bin/myscript.sh Restart=on-failure StandardOutput=file:%h/log_file [Install] WantedBy=default.target EOF echo "Reloading systemd for the user" systemctl --user daemon-reload || exit 1 echo "Enabling and starting the service" systemctl --user enable --now my_test_service.service
Content of
myscript.sh
:$ cat ~/bin/myscript.sh #!/usr/bin/env bash while true do now=$(date) me=$(whoami) echo "User $me at $now" sleep 10 done
Now run the script (
mytrojan.sh
) and check service status after that:$ ./mytrojan.sh Writing the service unit file Reloading systemd for the user Enabling and starting the service $ systemctl --user status my_test_service.service ● my_test_service.service - Script Daemon For Test User Services Loaded: loaded (/home/user/.config/systemd/user/my_test_service.service; enabled; vendor preset: ena> Active: active (running) since Thu 2023-10-19 12:15:21 EEST; 6s ago Main PID: 1666383 (myscript.sh) Tasks: 2 (limit: 18757) Memory: 556.0K CPU: 4ms CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/app.slice/my_test_service.service ├─1666383 /bin/bash /home/user/bin/myscript.sh └─1666387 sleep 10 Oct 19 12:15:21 tesla systemd[1866318]: Started Script Daemon For Test User Services
You failed. This requires the user to run a script aka manual intervention.
Now imagine that the script is set to run as part of the brave installation - you type “yes” please download brave, brave installs brave and runs this script. Linux isn’t immune to malware as you seem to think.
You would need the power of root to do all these aforementioned things (run a VPN service).
And am not saying that Linux is immune to malware, just that it’s not out of the norm to have package managers install services crucial for operation during installation. Since Windows doesn’t have package managers, I’m gonna replace package managers with packages in this reasoning.
I thought that you only were ignorant, but no, you’re more than that!
Maybe am ignorant but at least I understand the questions before I answer them.