Help with eliminating malware surviving a factory reset

Teracube 2e
#1

Hi forum,

I have been dealing with adware that has survived two factory resets, and an image flash using these batfile flash instructions.

After each reset I kept the apps I installed to major brands or banks (I’ll admit it’s still possible I overlooked something), but I’m still getting full page ads inserted when loading up other apps, as well as notification ads masquerading as coming from apps that should never have ads. The pattern has been that the ads reappear 13 days after the reset. The symptoms seem to match the behaviour of CopyCat which circulated in 3rd party app stores in 2017, but which articles report never made it into the Play Store. However CopyCat is old, and all the antivirus apps are reporting I don’t have anything. And I’ve never downloaded apps from anywhere other than the Play Store.

So my questions for you are:

  1. How many partitions does this phone have and what are they?
  2. How many places could a malware hide if 1) I’ve never unlocked my bootloader and 2) I’ve never rooted my phone.
  3. What steps do I need, or which combination of instructions already posted here do I need to be sure I eliminate this thing on the next flash?
1 Like
#2

Welcome!

Not a good time. Sorry you are experiencing this.

We have A/B System and Super, so try cmd flashing once, letting it load up fully, login without restoring backups, flash again, andfinally load without restoring backups or apps.

Use it 13 days and see. If it works fine, one of your user-installed apps is a trojan, which given how often new ones are found on Play Store, is unfortunately not impossible.

Edit:
Just for completeness, though it should not matter, make sure any microSD card you may have from prior usage is not installed during testing.

Is this tenable for you?