If you’re in the market for something that you can hook up to your pre-2015 television in Kenya to get more than a digital TV signal and aren’t willing to spend a lot just so that your child can stop watching their videos on your phone or so that your wife can get their fix of The Real Housewives of Nairobi or so that you can watch The Diplomat then, chances are, you’ve bought some no-name dirt-cheap Android box. It may or may not be running Android TV (yes, there’s a difference, educate yourself).
While you’re in the quest to find something on the cheap that you can plug it to your TV and do the aforementioned, or, maybe, just get the thrill of Android TV or Google TV over the standard smart TV experience offered by your TV’s maker or, you know, just get live sports on the cheap (IPTV) or at no cost at all (we don’t encourage content piracy but, hey, the options are there), you need to be extra careful. You may end up bringing home some malware.
The malware in question can be detrimental in several ways. It could keep pinging home and, since your streaming box has very limited resources, strain its overall performance so much that you end up with some laggy mess you dread using every time. You know, the kind where you click on something, head to the kitchen to fix yourself something and get back before it’s even executed the desired action? Those ones. Or another that can be remotely controlled by whoever planted the malware and pulled in to do hit jobs online (what infosec experts would call a botnet and DDoS – look them up).
We are coming up with the above conclusions courtesy of some research conducted by a cybersecurity researcher (Daniel Milisic) who shared his findings a few months ago on Reddit but which caught our attention recently thanks to this coverage by Tech Crunch. While the research may have been limited to a small sample size that one person can reasonably work with (and corroborated by a few other people) and just those offered on Amazon, it’s not hard to see the same being the case for you in Nairobi or anywhere else in Kenya or East Africa.
Local retailers ship in tonnes of such-like streaming boxes from China and other markets and the possibility is high that you can end up with something similar. While we can’t speak to everything you encounter in the market, we can definitely recommend a few of our favourites that are widely used elsewhere in the world and have a much stronger interest and community around them compared to your no-name box. You know, Xiaomi’s Mi Box (or whatever they’re calling it these days) will easily get flagged if it shipped with such.
