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Author Topic: Hacked. Vector android phone  (Read 1645 times)
tvbcof (OP)
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April 14, 2013, 04:56:14 AM
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Just a heads-up.

I was at a friends house eating dinner on the 11th and my phone hooked up to their Hughes satellite system automatically.  I got some sort of a message which I thought was a chat.  It was in some non-English script.  In responding I found that my keyboard had turned to Arabic.

I didn't think much of it until later that night when I noticed several weird drafts in my e-mail account (which is a Google Apps account.)

I looked at the logs to the extent that my admin account make possible, and my phone had accessed my e-mail account at that time.

I took the what precautions I could and looked around for other activity.  I could see no evidence of excessive disruption.  Although I have various sensitive documents in Google Drive, I make it a point to not keep access to financial stuff, and certainly not to Bitcoin stuff.

The next day I called the Verizon who said that it was almost certainly a hack since Arabic text would have to be downloaded.  I wiped my phone and set up a specific e-mail account for the phone only.  It will be a hassle to not be able to check my main e-mail from the phone, but what can a guy do?

This probably has nothing to do with Bitcoin, but it is the case that I have unwisely mentioned that I have something of a stash, and also I have recently documented this e-mail address in the PM of this forum, so it's not impossible.

I did a little google-searching for attacks which matched my observations about the char set changes and saw nothing.

I'm not much of a phone phreak and don't run a custom image or do almost anything on the phone except use the navigation facilities.  The only app I've installed was one which looks for GPS satellites so I can mollify my aggravation when the GPS is not working.  I can barely wait for mega.co.nz to have e-mail and collaborative document functions so I can switch to a more trusted platform.


sig spam anywhere and self-moderated threads on the pol&soc board are for losers.
Phinnaeus Gage
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April 14, 2013, 05:14:56 AM
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Not sure, but... http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/sep/27/samsung-htc-phones-remote-wipe
tvbcof (OP)
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April 14, 2013, 05:33:18 AM
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Does not seem to match a remote wipe issue.  Must have been something to do with the incoming chat (or whatever) since I was neither using my phone, nor did I click any link (purposely) which was part of the incoming message.

My phone is a droid4 on Verizon's LTE.  I had a boat-load of nice Samsung and HTC phones, but none of them would work on Verizon's service so I bought the droid4.  Awful piece of shit, and I find the 4G service to be inferior to my old 9600 baud modem a lot of the time.  Total waste of money.

The phone also comes bogged down with a zillion useless apps and conflicting services.  God-awful mess for someone who does not give a shit about cell phones.  Someday I'll see if I can find a nice custom image so I can trust the thing more.

Another interesting thing is that the tech I spoke to mentioned several times that 'the FBI has warned that task-killers contain viruses.'  I don't use any task killers.  I asked if it was related to the Carrier-IQ brew-ha from a while back.  He seemed a little surprised and sheepishly replied in the affirmative.  I labor under the assumption that pretty much all phones these days spy on everything we plebs do.  Orwell's telescreens on steroids.  I'll be mighty pissed if I get hacked because some hacker figured out how to tap into that data-stream.


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April 14, 2013, 05:51:19 AM
 #4

Carrier-IQ + Hughes satellite would explain a lot of things.
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