Cheap Android TV Boxes Pose as Phones and Turn Owners’ Broadband Into Proxies
Jul 31, 2026
IoT Security / Botnet
Bitsight says some cheap Android TV boxes have shipped with apps that rewrite their hardware identity to mimic Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, or Vivo phones, then click ads on websites run by the same operators. Researchers named the operation Fuyao and attributed it to Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Co., Ltd., a mainland China company founded in 2019. The same apps have a second job. When a box detects an HDMI signal, it usually switches to relaying other people's traffic through the owner's broadband line as a SOCKS5 exit node. With HDMI off, it goes back to waiting for ad-fraud tasks. Bitsight found the operation by registering an expired domain used as a factory backdoor and telemetry collector. Most identifiable devices reported the model name H96_MAX_V11, though Bitsight said its sinkhole view was skewed toward older models from one brand and did not establish a complete affected-model list. In one day, after filtering for devices carrying the Fuyao apps, the sinkhole ...
