http://www.tgdaily.com/security-feat...+-+All+News%29

Wondering if this could happen to Maemo...

I think we have warnings about similar concerns in the past, however with so few devices sold I wonder if it would be worth a developers time to place malware on a meamo app anyway.

You can never defend against user stupidity, regardless of the OS. If Maemo (or MeeGo) were a big enough target, and your users dumb enough to be convinced to load software from some random, no-name website, then yes it could happen.

I'll take the risk and bank on educating users than going the Apple path of the walled garden where instead I am spied upon by companies

..... and this is why i prefer open source

i cant believe one of those apps got over 50,000 downloads before someone realized it was sketchy

I can belive you make code review for every package you wanna install.

there has been multiple times when people have literally opened their devices to possible malware. so only thing missing is motivation to add some malware to packages/images.

(leaked PR1.3 + multiple questions about packages installed from murky locations)

;-)

At least some checks should be done.
There are several Antivirus tools for Linux like AVG,
Avast, F-Prot, Clamav, Avira AntiVir (I am not sure, if any of them were ported to Maemo 5).
There are also Web services were you can scan a file before putting it on the N900.
Scanning your N900 binaries in /usr/bin (and similar) from time to time may also tell you if you already got an infection.
Of course you'll never have a 100% security.
Of course the best security software is "Brain 4.0".


There were several threads for this topic:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=31373
http://www.forums.internettablettalk...ad.php?t=61583
and so on...

I wonder if our repositories (devel extra, whatever) are frequently
scanned or whenever a new file is uploaded?

My point was not that you would review every package's source before installing it, but that someone would. Looking at it from a Maemo perspective, I find it hard to imagine that such malware would last very long in our repositories before someone identified it as obvious crap. Granted Maemo has far less downloads than Android, but open source can only help in this scenario.