On the floor, the Superbox media streaming gadgets on the market at retailers like BestBuy and Walmart could appear to be a steal: They provide limitless entry to greater than 2,200 pay-per-view and streaming providers like Netflix, ESPN and Hulu, all for a one-time payment of round $400. However safety consultants warn these TV bins require intrusive software program that forces the consumer’s community to relay Web visitors for others, visitors that’s typically tied to cybercrime exercise comparable to promoting fraud and account takeovers.
Superbox media streaming bins on the market on Walmart.com.
Superbox payments itself as an reasonably priced method for households to stream all the tv and film content material they might presumably need, with out the effort of month-to-month subscription charges — for a one-time cost of almost $400.
“Bored with complicated cable payments and hidden charges?,” Superbox’s web site asks in a current weblog put up titled, “Low cost Cable TV for Low Earnings: Watch TV, No Month-to-month Payments.”
“Actual low-cost cable TV for low earnings options does exist,” the weblog continues. “This information breaks down the perfect options to cease overpaying, from free over-the-air choices to one-time buy gadgets that eradicate month-to-month payments.”
Superbox claims that watching a stream of flicks, TV exhibits, and sporting occasions received’t violate U.S. copyright legislation.
“SuperBox is rather like every other Android TV field available on the market, we can’t management what software program prospects will use,” the corporate’s web site maintains. “And also you received’t encounter a legislation situation except importing, downloading, or broadcasting content material to a big group.”
A weblog put up from the Superbox web site.
There may be nothing unlawful concerning the sale or use of the Superbox itself, which can be utilized strictly as a approach to stream content material at suppliers the place customers have already got a paid subscription. However that’s not why persons are shelling out $400 for these machines. The one approach to watch these 2,200+ channels without spending a dime with a Superbox is to put in a number of apps made for the system that allow them to stream this content material.
Superbox’s homepage features a outstanding message stating the corporate does “not promote entry to or preinstall any apps that bypass paywalls or present entry to unauthorized content material.” The corporate explains that they merely present the {hardware}, whereas prospects select which apps to put in.
“We solely promote the {hardware} system,” the discover states. “Prospects should use official apps and licensed providers; unauthorized use could violate copyright legislation.”
Superbox is technically appropriate right here, apart from possibly the half about how prospects should use official apps and licensed providers: Earlier than the Superbox can stream these hundreds of channels, customers should configure the system to replace itself, and step one entails ripping out Google’s official Play retailer and changing it with one thing known as the “App Retailer” or “Blue TV Retailer.”
Superbox does this as a result of the system doesn’t use the official Google-certified Android TV system, and its apps is not going to load in any other case. Solely after the Google Play retailer has been supplanted by this unofficial App Retailer do the varied film and video streaming apps which can be constructed particularly for the Superbox seem out there for obtain (once more, exterior of Google’s app ecosystem).
Specialists say whereas these Android streaming bins typically do what they promote — enabling patrons to stream video content material that may usually require a paid subscription — the apps that allow the streaming additionally ensnare the consumer’s Web connection in a distributed residential proxy community that makes use of the gadgets to relay visitors from others.
Ashley is a senior options engineer at Censys, a cyber intelligence firm that indexes Web-connected gadgets, providers and hosts. Ashley requested that solely her first identify be used on this story.
In a current video interview, Ashley confirmed off a number of Superbox fashions that Censys was finding out within the malware lab — together with one bought off the shelf at BestBuy.
“I’m certain lots of people are considering, ‘Hey, how unhealthy may or not it’s if it’s on the market on the massive field shops?’” she mentioned. “However the extra I seemed, issues received weirder and weirder.”
Ashley mentioned she discovered the Superbox gadgets instantly contacted a server on the Chinese language instantaneous messaging service Tencent QQ, in addition to a residential proxy service known as Grass IO.
GET GRASSED
Often known as getgrass[.]io, Grass says it’s “a decentralized community that permits customers to earn rewards by sharing their unused Web bandwidth with AI labs and different firms.”
“Patrons search unused web bandwidth to entry a extra numerous vary of IP addresses, which allows them to see sure web sites from a retail perspective,” the Grass web site explains. “By using your unused web bandwidth, they’ll conduct market analysis, or carry out duties like net scraping to coach AI.” 
Reached through Twitter/X, Grass founder Andrej Radonjic informed KrebsOnSecurity he’d by no means heard of a Superbox, and that Grass has no affiliation with the system maker.
“It appears to be like like these bins are distributing an unethical proxy community which persons are utilizing to attempt to reap the benefits of Grass,” Radonjic mentioned. “The purpose of grass is to be an opt-in community. You obtain the grass app to monetize your unused bandwidth. There are tons of sketchy SDKs on the market that hijack folks’s bandwidth to assist webscraping firms.”
Radonjic mentioned Grass has carried out “a sturdy system to establish community abusers,” and that if it discovers anybody attempting to misuse or circumvent its phrases of service, the corporate takes steps to cease it and forestall these customers from incomes factors or rewards.
Superbox’s father or mother firm, Tremendous Media Expertise Firm Ltd., lists its road deal with as a UPS retailer in Fountain Valley, Calif. The corporate didn’t reply to a number of inquiries.
In keeping with this teardown by behindmlm.com, a weblog that covers multi-level advertising (MLM) schemes, Grass’s compensation plan is constructed round “grass factors,” that are earned via the usage of the Grass app and thru app utilization by recruited associates. Associates can earn 5,000 grass factors for clocking 100 hours utilization of Grass’s app, however they need to progress via ten affiliate tiers or ranks earlier than they’ll redeem their grass factors (presumably for some kind of cryptocurrency). The tenth or “Titan” tier requires associates to build up a whopping 50 million grass factors, or recruit a minimum of 221 extra associates.
Radonjic mentioned Grass’s system has modified in current months, and confirmed the corporate has a referral program the place customers can earn Grass Uptime Factors by contributing their very own bandwidth and/or by inviting different customers to take part.
“Customers usually are not required to take part within the referral program to earn Grass Uptime Factors or to obtain Grass Tokens,” Radonjic mentioned. “Grass is within the strategy of phasing out the referral program and has launched an up to date Grass Factors mannequin.”
A overview of the Phrases and Situations web page for getgrass[.]io on the Wayback Machine exhibits Grass’s father or mother firm has modified names a minimum of 5 instances in the midst of its two-year existence. Looking the Wayback Machine on getgrass[.]io exhibits that in June 2023 Grass was owned by an organization known as Wynd Community. By March 2024, the proprietor was listed as Decrease Tribeca Corp. within the Bahamas. By August 2024, Grass was managed by a Half Area Labs Restricted, and in November 2024 the corporate was owned by Grass OpCo (BVI) Ltd. At the moment, the Grass web site says its father or mother is simply Grass OpCo Ltd (no BVI within the identify).
Radonjic acknowledged that Grass has undergone “a handful of company clean-ups over the past couple of years,” however described them as administrative adjustments that had no operational impression. “These replicate regular early-stage restructuring because the venture moved from preliminary improvement…into the present construction below the Grass Basis,” he mentioned.
UNBOXING
Censys’s Ashley mentioned the cellphone house to China’s Tencent QQ instantaneous messaging service was the primary purple flag with the Superbox gadgets she examined. She additionally found the streaming bins included highly effective community evaluation and distant entry instruments, comparable to Tcpdump and Netcat.
“This factor DNS hijacked my router, did ARP poisoning to the purpose the place issues fall off the community to allow them to assume that IP, and tried to bypass controls,” she mentioned. “I’ve root on all of them now, and so they even have a folder known as ‘secondstage.’ These gadgets even have Netcat and Tcpdump on them, and but they’re alleged to be streaming gadgets.”
A fast on-line search exhibits numerous Superbox fashions and plenty of comparable Android streaming gadgets on the market at a variety of prime retail locations, together with Amazon, BestBuy, Newegg, and Walmart. Newegg.com, for instance, at the moment lists greater than three dozen Superbox fashions. In all instances, the merchandise are bought by third-party retailers on these platforms, however in lots of cases the achievement comes from the e-commerce platform itself.
“Newegg is fairly unhealthy now with these gadgets,” Ashley mentioned. “Ebay is the funniest, as a result of they’ve Superbox in Spanish — the SuperCaja — which could be very standard.”
Superbox gadgets on the market through Newegg.com.
Ashley mentioned Amazon lately cracked down on Android streaming gadgets branded as Superbox, however that these listings can nonetheless be discovered below the extra generic title “modem and router combo” (which can be barely nearer to the reality concerning the system’s habits).
Superbox doesn’t promote its merchandise within the standard sense. Slightly, it appears to depend on lesser-known influencers on locations like Youtube and TikTok to advertise the gadgets. In the meantime, Ashley mentioned, Superbox pays these influencers 50 p.c of the worth of every system they promote.
“It’s bizarre to me as a result of influencer advertising often caps compensation at 15 p.c, and it means they don’t care concerning the cash,” she mentioned. “That is about constructing their community.”
A TikTok influencer casually mentions and promotes Superbox whereas chatting along with her followers over a glass of wine.
BADBOX
As plentiful because the Superbox is on e-commerce websites, it is only one model in an ocean of no-name Android-based TV bins out there to customers. Whereas these gadgets typically do present patrons with “free” streaming content material, additionally they have a tendency to incorporate factory-installed malware or require the set up of third-party apps that interact the consumer’s Web deal with in promoting fraud.
In July 2025, Google filed a “John Doe” lawsuit (PDF) towards 25 unidentified defendants dubbed the “BadBox 2.0 Enterprise,” which Google described as a botnet of over ten million Android streaming gadgets that engaged in promoting fraud. Google mentioned the BADBOX 2.0 botnet, along with compromising a number of forms of gadgets prior to buy, may infect gadgets by requiring the obtain of malicious apps from unofficial marketplaces.
Among the unofficial Android gadgets flagged by Google as a part of the Badbox 2.0 botnet are nonetheless extensively on the market at main e-commerce distributors. Picture: Google.
A number of of the Android streaming gadgets flagged in Google’s lawsuit are nonetheless on the market on prime U.S. retail websites. For instance, trying to find the “X88Pro 10” and the “T95” Android streaming bins finds each proceed to be peddled by Amazon sellers.
Google’s lawsuit got here on the heels of a June 2025 advisory from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which warned that cyber criminals have been gaining unauthorized entry to house networks by both configuring the merchandise with malicious software program previous to the consumer’s buy, or infecting the system because it downloads required functions that comprise backdoors, often through the set-up course of.
“As soon as these compromised IoT gadgets are related to house networks, the contaminated gadgets are inclined to changing into a part of the BADBOX 2.0 botnet and residential proxy providers recognized for use for malicious exercise,” the FBI mentioned.
The FBI mentioned BADBOX 2.0 was found after the unique BADBOX marketing campaign was disrupted in 2024. The unique BADBOX was recognized in 2023, and primarily consisted of Android working system gadgets that have been compromised with backdoor malware prior to buy.
Riley Kilmer is founding father of Spur, an organization that tracks residential proxy networks. Kilmer mentioned Badbox 2.0 was used as a distribution platform for IPidea, a China-based entity that’s now the world’s largest residential proxy community.
Kilmer and others say IPidea is merely a rebrand of 911S5 Proxy, a China-based proxy supplier sanctioned final 12 months by the U.S. Division of the Treasury for working a botnet that helped criminals steal billions of {dollars} from monetary establishments, bank card issuers, and federal lending applications (the U.S. Division of Justice additionally arrested the alleged proprietor of 911S5).
How are most IPidea prospects utilizing the proxy service? In keeping with the proxy detection service Synthient, six of the highest ten locations for IPidea proxies concerned visitors that has been linked to both advert fraud or credential stuffing (account takeover makes an attempt).
Kilmer mentioned firms like Grass are most likely being truthful once they say that a few of their prospects are firms performing net scraping to coach synthetic intelligence efforts, as a result of an excessive amount of content material scraping which finally advantages AI firms is now leveraging these proxy networks to additional obfuscate their aggressive data-slurping exercise. By routing this unwelcome visitors via residential IP addresses, Kilmer mentioned, content material scraping corporations could make it far trickier to filter out.
“Internet crawling and scraping has at all times been a factor, however AI made it like a commodity, information that needed to be collected,” Kilmer informed KrebsOnSecurity. “Everyone wished to monetize their very own information pots, and the way they monetize that’s completely different throughout the board.”
SOME FRIENDLY ADVICE
Merchandise like Superbox are drawing elevated curiosity from customers as extra standard community tv exhibits and sportscasts migrate to subscription streaming providers, and as folks start to appreciate they’re spending as a lot or extra on streaming providers than they beforehand paid for cable or satellite tv for pc TV.
These streaming gadgets from no-name expertise distributors are one other instance of the maxim, “If one thing is free, you’re the product,” that means the corporate is being profitable by promoting entry to and/or details about its customers and their information.
Superbox homeowners may counter, “Free? I paid $400 for that system!” However keep in mind: Simply since you paid so much for one thing doesn’t imply you might be finished paying for it, or that one way or the other you’re the just one who may be worse off from the transaction.
It might be that many Superbox prospects don’t care if somebody makes use of their Web connection to tunnel visitors for advert fraud and account takeovers; for them, it beats paying for a number of streaming providers every month. My guess, nevertheless, is that fairly just a few individuals who purchase (or are gifted) these merchandise have little understanding of the discount they’re making once they plug them into an Web router.
Superbox performs some severe linguistic gymnastics to assert its merchandise don’t violate copyright legal guidelines, and that its prospects alone are chargeable for understanding and observing any native legal guidelines on the matter. Nonetheless, purchaser beware: When you’re a resident of the USA, it is best to know that utilizing these gadgets for unauthorized streaming violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and may incur authorized motion, fines, and potential warnings and/or suspension of service by your Web service supplier.
In keeping with the FBI, there are a number of indicators to search for that will point out a streaming system you personal is malicious, together with:
-The presence of suspicious marketplaces the place apps are downloaded.
-Requiring Google Play Shield settings to be disabled.
-Generic TV streaming gadgets marketed as unlocked or able to accessing free content material.
-IoT gadgets marketed from unrecognizable manufacturers.
-Android gadgets that aren’t Play Shield licensed.
-Unexplained or suspicious Web visitors.
This explainer from the Digital Frontier Basis delves a bit deeper into every of the potential signs listed above.
