cellphone virus question and noe of my coworkers will believe me, am I wrong?

RepoDraghon

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Dec 3, 2012
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A coworker bought a phone brand is "Alc" something but it has that lockout virus that claims "pay us or we will report you to the FBI"

Well, I told him to factory reset the phone and that should get rid of the virus but my other coworkers wont believe me and say that resetting the device like that wont get rid of the virus... now I have 2 years of programming and they have none, plus, I myself had to deal with this virus on my parent's pc, I know wiping the mem and reinstalling the os with rid the pc of the virus, am I wrong about the phone?
 
Solution
depends. you're not wrong, but the reset might not be quite enough. think cloud backup. if you factory reset and that's all, you're guaranteed that there's no virus at that time. but if it's in the personal files and uploaded to the account backup on the cloud either ios or google, etc, it will be back when you first sync the device.

laviniuc

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Nov 29, 2013
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depends. you're not wrong, but the reset might not be quite enough. think cloud backup. if you factory reset and that's all, you're guaranteed that there's no virus at that time. but if it's in the personal files and uploaded to the account backup on the cloud either ios or google, etc, it will be back when you first sync the device.
 
Solution

laviniuc

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Nov 29, 2013
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ow i forgot, if the "factory image" - seeing the phone isn't a particularly trusty brand - has already the bad app (not downloaded from places) the reset won't help. you might have to do a hard install of a clean image instead
 

RepoDraghon

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Dec 3, 2012
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Ah, but he bought it like this from someone, so if he would use cloud then it wont be under the other person's name, it'd be his... the only other thought is if the virus is hardcoded...
 

bang9

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Jan 27, 2012
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I had a friend with the exact same issue and a Samsung note 2 email was bricking it lol all I had to do was to delete crome and catch file and reinstall and done.
But yes lock outs are real and quite frigging annoying.