Topic: Hacked. Vector android phone (Read 1644 times)
Carrier-IQ + Hughes satellite would explain a lot of things.
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.
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.
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