Jan "Jenkings" Škoda - blog

Here's another piece from my drawer. Another phone that I bought new. And it did not last very long. The funny thing is the name. It's called the DOGEE X5 MAX Pro. Every time I read that name, the Thundercougarfalconbird from the Futurama series immediately comes to mind.

The phone wasn't so bad and worked really well at first. However, later very weird things started to happen. Pop-up adverts and weird notifications started appearing, as well as automatically installed apps.



I was young, i was enjoying my "modern" phone and i was installing loads of shitty apps. As the phone memory is really low, i was installing and uninstalling them again and again and changing them for others. So i though, that i just installed some crap during these installations. So i made the factory reset, and everything worker well again. However after a month, or two, everything repeated. So another factory reset, and then i decided not to install any single app, and wait what would happen.. And in couple of weeks, again these notifications, unknown apps, popups, etc.

So then i started searching the internet and discovered, that this phone comes with preinstalled trojan. Whe ROM of the phone was compromited, probably in the manufacturing process, so all these X5 MAX PRO came out with trojan inside.

I thought that i could solve it by flashing some custom firmware, but the phone got almost bricked on each try of any custom ROM, and only i was able to make it working again was the stock ROM.. However even the stock rom images, served by manufacturer were infected too. So there was no solution. The phone was completely useless.. So i threw it to drawer and had to find another one.

Nowadays, it is an interesting example of wasted phone that was really fine, but destroyed during the manufacturing by the virus.



And.. it was also my very first phone i have really damaged. I am usualy taking a lot of care to protext my devices, however the frame of this phone was so ambitious and thin, as it cracked on many places. However the screen is almost untouched, and works. Only the frame is cracked, as you can see on the photo:



Unfortunately, I did not capture any interesting moments of Trojan activity, so here are just a couple of screenshots.

The first one shows the built-in web browser asking for six different permissions, none of which are for internet access, and one of them is also for making phone calls, which is very weird for a system browser to do.



The second screenshot shows a failed attempt to install an unwanted app. Fortunately, I have installed apps before and the phone has limited storage, as I wrote above, so there is no more space for this rubbish.