From if it sounds to good to be true it probably is department:
I was notified about something being hawked on a public Facebook page. Supposedly you can “fire your cable company” with this little box. What got them suspicious is the fact the seller would only do business on PM, with no public pricing information, and no real details about the product. The only things presented were a couple of screenshots of live events, a grainy picture of a stack of product boxes and a promise of live tv bliss. I did a quick dive into this thing and realized this is a pre-installed Kodi(formerly known as XMBC) product.
I have used XMBC and it is a good product. Open source, highly adaptable, no known chronic security flaws and the ability to display darned near anything you can think of across just about any kind of hardware device you can think of. My issues is not with Kodi itself but this little box with the label MXQ. Cursory online research shows they newest one runs android 5.5.5. This version of Android has serious security issues that allow for easy remote takeover of the device. On top of that the xmbc software itself is also “customized” which means it is now outside the tree of Kodi. You now have to decide on a shadowy company to properly maintain a customized version of Kodi while running a known insecure operating system and selling them to customers. The device might work great…and for those that purchase it I truly hope it does. However this is yet another IOT device that is being sold with no thought of security. If you buy one of these MQX machines make sure it is running the latest version of all software. This means you need to know what the operating system is and what version. Considering what I can find is Android 5.x which is an unsupported version of Android with known major security problems I advise high caution when buying this device. If you can find one running Android 6.x or better yet 7.0 then this is an excellent buy. Contact me if you want to stay informed on IOT trends and how they can affect you and your network’s security.