How To Recover Cell Phones From Wallpapers Containing Dangerous Malware

Illustration (Photo: Unsplash)

JAKARTA - Often we are bored with the appearance of the cellphone wallpaper. No doubt many of us are looking for free downloadable wallpapers on the internet. But, is it safe?

Recently, Twitter's social media has been buzzing with wallpapers containing malware. The picture is of a beautiful looking lake with an island in the center. However, once it is set as the background of the phone, expect bad things to happen to the user.

The news of this malware wallpaper was first tweeted by the @UniverseIce account which immediately made a statement that this event only happened to users who installed it on Samsung brand phones. The average occurs in the mid-range cellphone from the South Korean manufacturer.

Quoting from the NLT page, Monday, June 1, when they tried to open the metadata from the image, Google Inc. appeared. 2016 and Google Skia which claimed to be the source of that wallpaper.

According to industry experts and viewing recovery logs, that metadata is generated and appears when images are used. To restore it, the Android OS just restarts the UI. But the phone just blinks and shows the brand, so the decision should be continued to restart the UI until finally the phone system is weak, restarts the whole device, and leads to a bootloop.

Not only that, they also looked at the ICC profile (color profile) and found that this wallpaper uses the Google Skia color profile. But the question is, why the image with the Google Skia color profile doesn't work well on its own Google OS.

How to handle it

According to a thread made by gadget observer Lucky Sebastian on Twitter, he tried to set this wallpaper as the home screen display on his Samsung cellphone, as soon as the cellphone he was using immediately displayed restart mode, it was claimed this malware would make the data on the cellphone lost without being saved.

This wallpaper has no effect on other smartphones like Oppo, Xiaomi, etc. Only some types of Samsung are most likely OS10, and it is also rumored to be Google Pixel. If you want the original source of the image and want to try making the wallpaper here: https: //t.co/ O9wPEgrUCT

- Lucky Sebastian (gadtorade) May 31, 2020

From the video in the thread, Lucky shows that his cellphone only flashes occasionally and will eventually enter data erase mode. He also tries again by selecting try again, and goes into safe mode. But because the phone always restarts on its own, this attempt is difficult to succeed.

In the end, Lucky decided to Wipe Data. Because it looks like this wallpaper is carrying metadata which contains code to mess with the java runtime by throwing up lots of system crashes. Of course this will be bad for the health of the device.

However, after selecting Wipe Data, it turned out that Lucky's cellphone was instead brought into Safe Mode. However, the data on the cellphone has already been lost. To get out of safe mode, press power and select off. After the smartphone turns off, press the volume up button and the power button at the same time.

When the phone comes out the Samsung logo, release the power button and keep holding the volume up button until we enter the bootloader. Use volume to move up and down menus, and power to execute. Later, there will be two options for restoring a cellphone that has been infected with malware, namely doing Wipe Data or Wipe Cache Partition. When finished, click reboot system now.

Advice for wallpaper fans

For those of you who like to change cellphone wallpapers, so use the official application that can be downloaded on the Play Store and App Store to download wallpapers or use them from the default cellphone, so that the device that is your life partner has a long enough life.