[Q] Popup Ads in Lock Screen

Paperinik68 said:

Recently I've been getting ads popping up on my lock screen. Sometimes the popup may be up when I swipe out of lock and onto the home screen. I have downloaded some security programs, AD push apps, but none of them are able to detect which app is doing this.

Has anyone else had this issue?

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Are you using a replacement lock screen or the default one? If you can't narrow it down to be from a user based app you installed, I would full wipe immediately. You seemed to have done good troubleshooting with scanning with an antivirus(i prefer Eset) and using an ad push detector.

Do the security scanners get root rights?

ICS (and beyond) needed "tagged socket" support from the kernel so that the Android UI can tell you how much data had been used on an app-by-app basis (and probably also increase the granularity of Google spy-ware), so I have to imagine that it is possible to somehow figure that out. But this is sort of low-level stuff - not sure if there is a root app that will do this for you.

You sort of need some combination of "lsof" and "tcpdump". Maybe a tcpdump that is socket-tag aware. (I recently built an ARM version of tcpdump, but I haven't spent much time with it - don't know if that capability is in there.). In this scenario you would run a command-line tool via adb with the screen locked. Or maybe there is a way to dump android's "per-app data usage monitor" rapidly - review of time-stamped data might show you who the villain app is.

Are you sure it's not just the browser? (e.g. if you kill all tabs in you browser, does it still happen?)

Use "Norton Spot". Great app that tells you who is doing what.

Sent from my Galaxy Note III; Previous owner/hacker of Galaxy S III, Galaxy Nexus, Droid X, HTC HD2, HTC Touch Pro 2, HTC Tilt, HTC 8525, O2 XDA II, O2 XDA.