[MUSIC]
And okay, we are ready to start.
So from the US, we have two first time campers that are going to present
awesome stuff to us, Matt and Adam.
They are going to talk us about product review and the malware and
the back doors that they have been able to find in those situations.
So please give a huge applause to our speakers, please.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Hello, thank you.
I'm Adam Shaw and this is Matt and this is our time in a product review cabal and
the malware and bugs that came with it.
A little bit about us, I lead a team of AppSec engineers.
I'm a home lab enthusiast.
I have my own conference that I help run in Omaha, Nebraska in the United States.
And I help run my local Defcon group.
And also I help with a conference in Hawaii called LocomocoSec.
Highly recommended if you're able to get out there for that one.
>> And hey everyone, my name is Matt Veras.
It is my real last name.
I'm a IoT engineer at Cisco for about 15 years now.
I'm a part time farmer.
I'm a big hardware junkie.
I take everything apart and find out how it works.
I'm a former DOD forensic malware reverse engineer analyst.
And I'm founder of hackspace.io.
Slides and stuff from previous projects are posted out there.
So go check it out and follow us both on Twitter or on Slack or wherever.
>> Awesome.
And just a quick disclaimer.
All of this work was done for research purposes only.
Nothing we discussed today is representative of our employers.
We ensured that every review, photo and video were immediately taken down and reported.
This is platform agnostic.
It affects all online retailers, not specific ones.
And we're an ethical cabal.
So in July we were accepted for this talk.
Big thank you to Millie Ways and the staff that put this on.
This is one of my favorite childhood books.
So I was super pumped about it.
And then in August we decided we had to make the slides.
So if you saw us, you know, by our tent, we were working on this for quite some time.
This is my wife and I, this is like our normal interaction when we have a talk coming up.
I've almost started.
So in 2020, there was obviously the global pandemic with COVID.
And it meant that everyone needed to wear masks.
It was known for three things, right?
One, video streaming, all those streaming services.
And online shopping.
Yeah.
So what kind of stuff did you order online?
Maybe groceries, maybe delivery for food or things like that.
But not us.
We ordered all kinds of electronic gizmos and stuff that we really didn't need but looked
cool and was cheap because we were all stuck at home doing whatever we could only do at
home.
So that's kind of where we were.
So this whole thing started with a postcard.
I had ordered a smart switch from a company called Treat Life.
And in the box there was this postcard saying, "We are celebrating our company anniversary.
And you write to us, send us a note and we'll send you a free gift."
And who doesn't like a free gift?
So I reached out to them.
You could see the note there.
I said, "Hello, Treat Life team.
I like free stuff.
How does this work?"
And they said, "Oh, hello."
And you just buy our thing from this retailer and we'll give you a refund for it.
And you don't even have to leave us a review or anything.
Please just go buy it and everything will be good."
So we did.
So how it would kind of work is you would reach out to this retailer and say, "Hey,
I received this offer."
And then they would say, "Buy it."
And then we'll refund your money in PayPal or Amazon or whatever gift card you would
like.
And then you would have the device and use it and there would be no strings with some
vendors.
But then as we move forward, we learned that some vendors play by some different rules
and they may require a positive five-star review before they'll give you the reimbursement.
And it must have pictures or must have this or must have that.
But in general, with some of the vendors, they would give it for free for no strings
attached.
So once we start collecting things, it got to be quite a lot.
Cameras, switches, a lot of smart home devices.
I'm a big smart home automation firmware enthusiast, so that's kind of where I was targeting.
But then other strange devices too like a vacuum cleaner, which was really interesting.
And lots of cameras and other things, desk lamps, steaks, kitchen appliances, all kinds
of things.
So the list grew.
And as we collected more things, we started getting emails from additional vendors that
we hadn't necessarily reached out to directly.
It seemed that there was kind of this special list of customers that was shared amongst
these companies that were sending things out for free.
And so the more that we interacted with them, the more we got.
And the more vendors came to ask us if we would like their stuff.
So more is always better.
And then we started thinking like a hacker or thinking like a larcenist, what if we were
to use multiple email accounts to interact with them?
What if I want two of that thing or maybe five of that thing?
How could I do that?
So we'll have multiple email accounts and forward messages between them and collect things.
And we were wondering at first, like, is this a good idea?
Will they notice?
They did not.
They did not notice at all.
And in fact, things kind of escalated on from there.
So the thing that happened then is as we started collecting things and telling our friends,
they were jealous of all of the cool stuff we got.
Like I want stuff too.
So sharing is caring.
And we started to share some of our friends' contact information with these vendors.
And some of the sharing we did was official.
It was hello, Mr. Vendor, I have a friend who would like to work with you and the vendors
would always say yes.
But then as we'll talk about in a slide or two, some of the referrals were maybe not
quite so official.
So we'll talk about that in just a moment.
>> Yeah.
And along the way, we realized that there's just a bunch of people out there sending these
messages and they don't really care what we respond with.
They don't really care who we are.
They don't really care where we're sending the items.
I was sending items to like family members at some points.
And then I realized that they didn't care.
So I started sending them to different apartments in my own house.
I had six or seven apartments in my house that I would send them to.
And they just all show up on my doorstep.
And we realized, okay, let's just share the -- not only are we sharing like -- not only
are we telling the vendors, hey, contact this person, but now if they contact us, let's
just send that email to another one of our friends.
And then more friends can sign up.
And then more friends.
We eventually just dropped all the pretense altogether.
And we started by sending -- we would change the headers and modify the email and make
it look like they had emailed us.
But at the end of it, I was just replying to ones that were sent to Matt, for example.
>> Like, hey, Adam, I got an invite for a pool filter and some kitchen knives.
Would you like that one?
>> And I say, I need some knives.
Sure.
And I would just reply to the email address and say, please send me knives.
And they'd say, okay.
And so they'd just send stuff then.
And we started sharing the best invites.
And this is how we built this cabal of people who we would just share all the invites with.
And we'd say, hey, I got an invite group or chat.
And this invite is product X, Y, and Z. And somebody would say, I need product Y.
And so we just forward the email to them.
And somebody else would say, I need product X and forward the email to them.
And nobody ever seemed to notice.
And we just, everyone just got free stuff.
The profit slide where Matt had all of those different things, every one of us had closets
like that, you know, where we were just filling up with stuff.
The problem is, they started turning into pushers.
They started sending us emails and they'd say, hey, here is 60 products.
Pick two of them that you want.
And they would be the most wacky products.
Sex toys.
Dog treat dispensers.
Pool floaties.
Yeah.
Toilet scooters.
Toilet drain stoppers.
Yeah.
Pasta dishes.
And we didn't really care about a lot of those.
What we cared about was the technology ones that we were interested in and researching.
But it got extensive.
And there was a few main characters in this.
If you see these on your recommended anywhere, know that 90% of their reviews are probably
fake.
One of them is Vixer.
See all the different emails.
It's a little difficult to see in the sunlight over here, but all the different emails on
the right from Vixer over 2020.
Apeman was a big one.
They would send us emails constantly and Treat Life.
Treat Life was one of our favorites.
By far the favorite.
Yeah.
Because highly recommended.
Well, they send good quality products that are mostly not...
Well, we'll get into the technical details in a minute.
But they also never really cared if you did the reviews or not.
We would go and make a review.
And for some products that you had to have a review before they reimbursed you, and then
we would immediately delete the review and report it.
Or other products, like Treat Life, I could just open up my developer console in Chrome
and just edit one to look like I just made a review and screenshot it and send it.
And they didn't even look.
They were just like, "All right, here's money.
Here you go."
Yeah, or even they would just say, "Please send us your order ID."
And after they got the order ID, they would just pay right away.
Yeah.
And then Facebook groups.
We were involved in a lot of these.
In fact, after the pandemic, we pretty much stopped doing this.
It was a while back, but we still get invites all the time.
And they're primarily moving to Facebook now, I've noticed.
I get a lot of Facebook invites, and they email to me to join their Facebook group.
And they're actually moving countries now, too.
While I was preparing slides, one of the emails I got for a Facebook group was specific to
Thailand.
So only in Thailand do they want people to come and do reviews, which I thought was interesting.
But what about the stuff?
We're giving all this free stuff, but what about it?
And for that, let's dive deep.
Yeah.
So this is by no means exhaustive or complete.
This is just a few of the particularly interesting details from a deep dive of what the hardware
and software looked like.
So I encourage you to do your own research and follow along if you'd like.
So the first case study we'll talk about is the three T's.
Treat Life, Tekken, and Tuya.
So Treat Life and Tekken use the Tuya IoT platform.
Maybe some of you have heard of the Tuya platform.
It's one of the largest in the world.
And anybody can sign up to use Tuya.
You just pay them a few dollars, and you can use their development kit, and you can even
use their hardware that they kind of white label, and then you can cook your own firmware
for it, and it's very interesting.
So interesting things about Tuya is they store a number of things in plain text.
They collect a number of things plain text.
Phone number, the device that you use to set it up, the SSID that it connects to, the device
stats like when a light switch turns on or off, things like that.
But where things get really interesting and particularly dangerous that maybe people haven't
thought of is a number of the vacuum cleaners, including the one that I got through this
program.
They're using the Tuya platform.
So the floor plans of your house are potentially in the Tuya cloud, and whatever vendor sold
that to you can access that and sell that to anyone or do whatever they'd like with
it.
So that's interesting.
And of course the device manufacturer, whoever that is, they can push a firmware update whenever
they want, and they can do it silently.
So if you -- I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but if you go look at Michael Stegerwald's
talk from a few years ago at a CCC event, he talks extensively about the evils of Tuya
and how they can do all sorts of interesting things.
I'd encourage you to go take a look at that.
So the first wave of devices that were collected from TreatLife and from Tekken were ESP8266-based,
and it's a great microprocessor.
It's fantastic for the hacker community.
The Wemos D1 minis for sale over in the village, that's an ESP8266.
They're easy to flash, Arduino compatible, very good firmware.
And what happened eventually is we were flashing devices just with an interface with the FTDI.
And then there was this massive vulnerability that Stegerwald came out with from VTrust
where we were able to flash device firmware over the air without having to take it apart
or solder or anything, and it was great.
It's called TuyaConvert, and the link's right there.
You can check it out.
And TuyaConvert worked for quite a while.
There were several kind of cat and mouse games where the firmware got patched and then the
exploit got rewritten, and eventually it stopped working.
They changed the way that the keys were derived for the devices, and no longer could we just
flash them over the air because of the private key and public key interaction between the
server and the device.
So then things were great.
We were collecting all these devices and taking all of this terrible Tuya code off
and putting firmware like Tesmota or ESPHome running it with Node-RED.
But then the devices themselves changed.
The ESP8266 disappeared.
And despite this very substantial change in the device, the FCC documentation never changed.
And that's kind of an interesting question for devices that the FCC reviews.
If there's a substantial change, it's supposed to require a follow-on examination.
I would say that changing the microcontroller would be substantial enough to require a new
examination.
So it became very hard to know which device would have which controller or which CU.
So we kind of got to where you try to order from maybe different vendors and try to find
one that had old stock because at the time we didn't really know what to do with these
processors and we didn't want to just put them on our network and deal with the evilness
of Tuya.
But the interesting thing about these controllers is they were the same pinout as the ESP, but
they were not able to run Arduino code, so it was good and bad.
Then we figured out that they're pin compatible with the ESP32C3 and the ESP12F, so we'd use
a hot air station and just drop the chip off and then put a chip flash with Tesmota or
potentially ESPHome, but usually Tesmota, so you could step through the GPIOs and figure
out the hardware traces and do that easily.
So then everything was very good again.
We could take these devices with terrible processors and use them with our open source
code.
Very good.
But then moving forward, Khalid Nassar and some others, there's an excellent post here.
You should definitely go read it.
He walks through a very detailed posting of how some data was stored in some fields inappropriately
and there was no bounce checking on it, so we were able to inject code into that buffer.
And through that we're able to run a vulnerability that's been called named Tuya Cloud Cutter.
And with Cloud Cutter, originally we were able to modify the local keys on the device,
and when we modify the local keys, we could potentially write the same key to all of the
devices that we're working with.
So we have a common key to access our devices, and once we modify the keys, then Tuya can
no longer interact with the device, so we still have untrusted firmware, but we have
a device that we can control that no one else can control, so it's generally good.
And there are ways to hook that device with different automation platforms and make it
work, so that was good.
But then as we moved forward, there was some substantial development done with a project
called, it was originally called Libretuya, but Tuya got mad at that, so it became renamed
Libretiny.
And another one called OpenBeckon.
Libretiny is a port of ESPHome that runs on the Becken hardware, and it looks a lot like
ESPHome works the same as YAML-based.
There's a container plugin for Home Assistant, it all works very well.
And OpenBeckon is a standalone hardware.
It's kind of sort of similar to Tasmota, if any of you have used it, but it gives you
an API and MQTT and everything, and it runs standalone on the device.
Fairly stable, revved a lot, the developer is active in a lot of discords, and as is
the developer for Libretiny, very active.
So in the end, we have hardware that was previously untrusted that we couldn't work with, that
was linked to a generally evil overlay platform, but now we're able to put whatever firmware
we want on it, control it how we want, and we're able to audit all of the functions that
firmware does.
So very powerful, and we take a device that we can't trust at all to a device that we
absolutely trust, and we can do whatever we'd like with it.
The next case study is around cameras, and there are many cameras that were collected.
I use these, I live on a farm, so I use some of these cameras in the shop and for outdoor
surveillance and kind of all over the place, so many cameras.
And the default in stock firmware was very much not good, very unstable, and very interesting
connections outbound.
Some of the cameras were using the Tuya platform, and interesting, some of them were leaking
to Chinese IP space in earlier firmwares, and there was one, I forgot to collect the
data and save it, but in advance of a firmware update, before it was beaconing out to some
Chinese IP space, and then after a firmware update it was leaking out to a cloud provider
that was US IP space, but it's important to know that the country destination of the,
the country of the destination IP is really not all that important, and in the end there's
nothing that stops a foreign national from creating a cloud provider account and collecting
data and packing it off wherever they'd like.
So whether that's a US cloud provider or a Chinese cloud provider, it still should be
handled with a minimal amount of trust.
So the, in particular the cameras that were not on the Tuya platform, there's one from
S-Cam that was very interesting, it has this P2P connectivity and there's a QR code that
has a device ID, and this device ID, if you have it, you can connect to the camera with
no authentication, all you need is that device ID, so it's very dangerous.
And a gentleman named Paul, he gave a big talk on the dangers of this particular P2P
network at Defcon, I think two years ago, but the link is there, definitely go watch
it, there's huge exposure, and the goal of the P2P network is to make it so you don't
have to port forward, or so you can use these cameras behind a CG NAT and still have access
to the video, but the thing about that is it gives whoever's authoring the firmware
and pushing the updates the ability to do reverse shells and all those things as well, so it's
a terrible security vulnerability and just something that's very dangerous that you should
not ever trust on your network.
So with this particular camera, there's an app to set it up called the P6S Lite, and
some of the early documentation of the app references local mode, where you could open
the app on your phone and it would find the camera and peer to it and then you could do
local mode and it would pull up an interface where you could tell the camera to connect,
and so this particular app was missing that function, and so that was troubling, it was
kind of what happened to this interface.
So it started trolling around on an Android phone and was able to connect to the SSID
broadcast by the camera and then exited the app, dropped into the network settings and
saw that it was a very non-standard, very strange DHCP IP that I'd been assigned, but with a
very common gateway, a .1 gateway, so opened a browser window to .1 on my phone and here
I have the interface to this camera, and once I have access to the camera's web interface,
I was able to configure it to SSID and configure it to join my network and I was able to not
allow it to register on the P2P network, so interesting functionality that was there in
like the 2.x version of the app that was gone in the 3.x and they're now on 5 or late 5s
or early 6s, so it's like that function was purposefully taken out, at least that would
be my conjecture, so an interesting removal from that APK.
So I kind of got ahead of myself a bit, but yeah, the local mode was gone and when you
do this via direct web interface, the P2P registration does not happen and as you see in this one,
this is an iteration I did while using the actual app and doing it and this camera actually
did join that P2P network and all sorts of interestingness, so every camera, whether
it was Tuya or non-Tuya platform, every camera beaconed out, some a little bit, some a whole
lot, some of the interesting addresses were some of them were China and some other ones
were China and some of that's Alibaba, some of it's not and some of the other IP connections
were previously, like I said, to China and then some to other non-Chinese cloud providers
but still not to be trusted.
The cameras worked to a varying degree of success, some not at all and some really well
with RTSP and ONVIF, those are ways to access a camera locally and have the data local and
not out to a cloud or a cloud server, some of them worked, some of them did not at all
and the typical ways with the non-trusted firmware that you can take a camera like that that
does allow ONVIF or RTSP to allow and have it be semi-trusted is create a P2P reservation
for it with no default gateway and/or give it no DNS, have layer 3 ACLs, even layer 2
ACLs if you'd like, there are a number of ways to take a device like that and pin it
in a corner but still have it be usable, not necessarily the recommended way.
Most of the cameras were using Acya and Realtek chipsets, if you troll around a bit you can
find that the UART and JTAG interfaces for these chipsets are generally documented, I
wouldn't say well documented but I would say that they are documented and there are OpenIPC
for sure works on the S-cam, I set that up and it works fairly well, there's a lot of
the Realtek firmware support for the Yi cameras and some of the Victor cameras and some of
the others, so with some digging you can get this set up and working and you can get these
cameras to run code that you can actually audit and you know what it does because you've
seen the code and you can follow the packets so that would be my suggestion if you're going
to chase after any of these devices is do a bit of research, pull down my slides, find
some of the devices that use these particular chipsets that you can push your firmware to
and not have to deal with some third party vendors firmware and be at their mercy.
Yeah, unsurprisingly cameras were probably the most emailed thing that we got, you know
obviously vendors wanted you know wanted insight into our homes, baby monitors were up there
too, I actually had small kids during the pandemic and had used some of these products
as baby monitors so obviously they had to be safe.
The other big one was some type of routers, there was mesh routers and Wi-Fi extenders
that they were always offering and I think that's pretty obvious too why that was another
one that got offered a lot.
In this case study this is a mesh force router, the router configuration required a phone
to set up, they don't have a web interface for the router and Nmap showed three open
ports 5500 which is UPMP, obviously that should be disabled by default to protect security
and it wasn't.
Port 9000 for the app interface and ports 12598 used for auto configuring the Wi-Fi
repeaters.
Originally the app used clear text TCP coms over port 9000 to retrieve the serial number
and configure the device, the serial number then became an unchangeable password and you
weren't able to do anything about that.
This is again this is the mesh force router which is still on sale today on online retailers.
Also then the Android reached out to a few places, one the router, fine, for some reason
it tried to call out to Facebook, I don't know why and then lastly another IP, I wonder
what that is, it's China.
So this is another case where we were looking at a device that basically was calling out
to places to give them access or some type of data and what else went wrong with it?
We had an APK of the app, the Android app, so APKs obviously we can expand and dwell
into them and when you do that and look at the Java classes with something like JD GUI,
we saw references to CGI bin Lucy admin data manager which if you Google it and do some
research, this is a possible tender back door which has been everywhere.
Here's a couple of articles referencing a tender back door in wireless routers and this
is something that is very similar and that's as deep as we went right there because that
was enough for me to junk it to be honest and we have a giveaway and we're giving it
away but honestly this was a really fun time because we were stuck at home and we had a
lot of time on our hands and so we were able to pour all of our time into looking into
these products to determine what's safe and what wasn't.
Some lessons that we learned, if something is too good to be true, it probably is, right?
Always check your hardware that you're buying offline in a safe environment before plugging
it into like a production home operations and be wary of online reviews.
Research with caution, not all of them are legitimate.
So how do you spot fake reviews?
Again, all of Matt's and I reviews were then immediately deleted and nuked from the platform
but here's how you can spot fake reviews if you're online and if you're looking at buying
a product.
One, is this a brand you trust?
Does it have a trusted name in the industry or is it something you've never heard of before?
Some of these vendors would send us emails with different names, different product names,
so they were constantly recreating companies and putting a new decal on their product and
that was a brand new company for them.
So they were switching company names all the time.
If you can check user history, do it.
Not all platforms allow you to view reviews that a user has left but some platforms do.
Some of these online retailers allow you to view other things that this person has reviewed.
Check that out if you can.
If you see a lot of, well, a lot of reviews frankly on particular products, that could
be a red flag.
So all of these reviews, the ones that required us to leave a review before a refund, they
also required that you left a picture.
So I'm not saying that pictured reviews are necessarily more fake but that's something
that was like, bare minimum, you had to add it.
Yeah, sure.
And one other thing is the reviews all had to be five stars.
Could be four, had to be five.
So be very wary and when we would leave these reviews, we wanted to get our money but we
would still write a review that would maybe say, "Hey, here's three good things and two
really bad things but I still give it five stars because the good things were so good."
So if you see reviews that are like, "This product was great except for this was really
terrible but I give it five stars."
That was written to get a reimbursement for sure.
I had some egregious ones where I'd say, "Here's one good thing and here's six bad things about
this product and they still send me the money but I was trying to warn people from getting
that particular product."
And then the other thing, the time the review has been posted.
So this is an industry, right?
This is a business.
You can go purchase fake reviews online and there are companies out there who will go
and they'll find email lists like our names are on these email lists and they'll just
spam them and try to get people to do reviews and if the reviews have been posted within
a few days, it might be fake because usually companies nowadays, online retailers, they've
used reports like Matt and I have been doing and others to actually get pretty good at
detecting fake reviews and they'll ban accounts too.
They'll ban an account if they see enough fake reviews but usually that's a one or two
day process before they can determine, "Hey, is this review legitimate or fake?"
And so if you have a review that's less than two days old, good chances are that you want
to maybe circle back in a few days and see if it's still there.
Now this isn't all doom and gloom.
There are good companies that do these kind of things.
A good example is Amcrest.
Amcrest has actually reached out to people like Matt and I and they've offered a research
fee for purchasing their camera and reviewing.
They never asked for an online review.
They only asked for us to review and send them our feedback, right?
And this is an example of a 4K camera that they sent us and the product cost $80 but
the research fee was $140, which is another good way to do it.
Not only that but we were still able to pass the emails around the cabal and so we all
have Amcrest cameras now, which is great.
The feedback we gave them we think is valuable too.
One of the things that we -- this is a little difficult to see here but hopefully the stream
can see it in the videos later.
But there's a red -- there's a red lens on this camera and a red lighting area for the
infrared at nighttime.
The product doesn't actually have it.
But the picture has it.
So, like, that's something that we were able to call out.
When you open the box up, it actually looks a lot cleaner than the picture that they're
using for the product does.
So we were able to call it out, give them feedback, and that's a good symbiotic relationship,
right?
Where we're able to give them good and honest feedback but we don't have to then go and
leave them a five-star review and inflate their online reviews.
That said, I'd be happy to give this a five-star review.
It was a good product.
Some sources that we didn't mention in the slide deck.
KU.NZ, this is a blog.
This gentleman actually researched the mesh router before I did.
And so a lot of the same things that he found, we found.
But that's a good one.
Also all the icons that we got are from the noun project and the flat icon.
It's all, you know, sourced, free icons.
Thank you for your time.
And we'll go ahead and take some questions.
[ Applause ]
>> So, yeah.
Thank you a lot for a great talk.
The questions are going to be there.
So please line up.
If you're like want to make the questions from the Internet, the obvious channels from
Fediverse and Matrix are taking questions as well.
>> Yeah.
Can you guys tell me what's the most expensive item you got?
>> So there were two things that I got that were kind of noteworthy.
I got a robot vacuum that was around $200.
And still works pretty well.
Don't trust it at all.
But it works well.
It's in my shop.
It cleans the floor out there.
And then the other thing that was a little more like $250 US dollars is a DVR system.
It had the central DVR.
Had to put your own hard drive in it.
But then it had five cameras.
And the cameras, it was all on between the cameras and the DVR.
And it worked really well.
But the review that was submitted for that product actually got flagged as fake and got
deleted.
In the lag time between when I reached out to the vendor to request the refund, they
said oh, your review that you sent the screen shot of does not exist.
And I was like, ugh, it is what it is.
So I had to send that back.
But yeah, the vacuum was $200 and the DVR system was around $250.
>> The most expensive thing that I got was actually probably that mesh router which was
around $200 as well.
There was a clear cap on at least when I was going through it on the dollar amount that
they would go which was usually $250.
If it got above $200, they were very demanding on the type of review and the type of account
that you had to have in order to post the review.
A lot of these people required that you have an account with that online retailer for over
two years before you could post a review on something that was expensive.
>> And on the expensive things, like one other thing that we didn't mention is they would
have these stipulations like you must have a long standing account, you must have this.
But then they would try to sweeten the deal a little bit.
They would say and we'll refund plus a 10% commission.
A 10% uplift for your trouble.
And then sometimes you would tell a vendor, no, that's a lot of work and I can't do that.
They would say, well, what if we paid you half up front and then you post the review
and we pay you the other half.
So they would get really aggressive and try to get you to buy the higher dollar products.
>> I got a projector that was about $200 too.
And they're sweetening the deal.
Was a projection screen which I thought was really good.
I was like, oh, yeah, that sounds great.
So they sent me a big sheet of paper.
>> Okay.
We've got to have the next question from there as well.
>> Thanks for the talk, guys.
My first question is what do you think the main motivation for this type of behavior
is?
Is it profiteering, e-crime, state sponsored, or is it a mix of them all?
>> Yeah.
So I think that there, even within what we did, there were multiple motives.
I think that like TreatLife was trying to be the number one company.
If you would go on online retailers and search for smart home, smart switch, smart dimmer,
TreatLife wanted to be the number one product.
And the way you get to be the number one search result is by selling the most volume.
And selling volume to people who will maybe write reviews but more just selling volume,
period.
So I think TreatLife was trying to trend in the searches.
And I think that maybe other vendors had different motives as far as data collection and marketing
and selling data.
So I think both.
>> Yeah.
I think some of the -- so there's an external company, right?
There are external companies that actually do -- there's external companies that actually
mark -- that do this.
And they'll sell and they'll market and they'll get you reviews, et cetera.
And what they're -- they're going for profit, right?
But if I'm a bad actor and I want my back doors in as many devices as possible, I hire
them to then go do that.
So there's two different kind of motives I see.
But good question.
Thank you.
>> Okay.
We have a next question from the Internet, please.
>> Yep.
The Internet asks, how can someone start or get involved in such a --
>> The first rule of Fight Club is we don't talk about Fight Club.
>> Yeah.
Good question.
>> There are still products that have those types of postcards in them.
Maybe just try to find some or maybe send me a note on Twitter and I can help you.
>> The postcards are the entry for us.
So if you're buying those products, they'll come online.
Yep.
Please go ahead.
>> I had a quick question about you said you were reporting those products sometimes.
Was that to the eShops themselves or to some kind of government agency?
And did you get any reply from any of them?
>> The online retailers.
Yeah.
The online retailers.
And then usually we'd have them deleted and report it.
And so the replies were nothing or minimal.
>> Yeah.
Just automated response generally.
>> Yeah.
Thank you.
We will get back to you.
And then we never hear back.
Good question, though.
>> Okay.
We have still time for a couple of questions if somebody has some.
If not, please give a huge applause to Adam and Matt.
Thank you.
>> Thank you.
>> And thank you again to the Millieways crew for putting this on.
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