Worse yet, side loading causes Fortnite to be vulnerable to man-in-the-disk (MitD) attacks a new attack vector discovered by Check Point Securities in early August. An application becomes vulnerable to a MitD attack when it writes data outside the protected on-board memory, often on an external SD card. That SD card lacks the protections of on-board memory and allows low-level processes already running on the phone to hijack the memory and installation process of legitimate applications such as Fortnite. A very poor installation process made Fortnite especially vulnerable to attack. Teaching users that side loading applications is an acceptable way to install is akin to the US Internal Revenue Service announcing that they will begin accepting tax payments in the form of Google Play credit or Green Dot Moneypak cards and that they will regularly contact taxpayers by phone that they owe a tax obligation. The damage to the public trust would be immense. Google Play Protect scans over 50 million applications daily and removes malicious apps. While the Google Play Store is far from perfect when detecting and blocking malicious apps, it is still better than the Wild West that is "side loading”, the act of installing an application outside of the Official Play Store. Unsuspecting players looking for the official application in the Google Play Store will be met with numerous malicious and fake versions of the applications.This will normalize this process and behavior, making users believe this is a typical way to install applications. Side loading requires instructing people to disable all of the built-in Android protections against unknown, unverified, or unsigned code.On the other hand, Android is less secure and allows for the side loading of applications without the need to go through the official Google Play Store, effectively cutting Google out of their 30% cut. Epic Games decided to take advantage of this and not only made Fortnite available as a standalone APK installer, it removed the official Fortnite app from the Google Play Store and actively encourages users to side load Fortnite. This is very worrisome for a number of reasons.
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