Do I need a new phone handset?

MattMattMattUK

dowling71 said:

Hi thanks for that I suppose what I'm asking is what physical access would they have needed to permanently compromise the phone?

The kind of people of permanently compromising a phone are not the people living in temporary accommodation. Software can be done reasonably quickly and one can buy and set up the processes needed to do it online, but it does require a reasonable level of competence. To permanently compromise a phone would require taking it apart and adding/changing components, that is not going to have happened. A factory reset will have solved any potential compromise. 

400ixl

MattMattMattUK said:

dowling71 said:

Hi thanks for that I suppose what I'm asking is what physical access would they have needed to permanently compromise the phone?

The kind of people of permanently compromising a phone are not the people living in temporary accommodation. Software can be done reasonably quickly and one can buy and set up the processes needed to do it online, but it does require a reasonable level of competence. To permanently compromise a phone would require taking it apart and adding/changing components, that is not going to have happened. A factory reset will have solved any potential compromise. 

It would not need to have any physical components changed.

However doing it in 8 minutes and not wiping the data partition is highly unlikely as they would need to flash a compromised ROM to the device to make it survive a factory reset.

In the time they had it, worst likely case was to load some software onto the phone, be it a remote control app, a keyboard logger or something similar. A hardware refresh would have wiped that.

You will not require a new phone. For the absolute paranoid depending on the phone you could unlock the bootloader and reflash the OEM ROM onto it. But that is really not needed from what you have described.

dowling71

400ixl said:

MattMattMattUK said:

dowling71 said:

Hi thanks for that I suppose what I'm asking is what physical access would they have needed to permanently compromise the phone?

The kind of people of permanently compromising a phone are not the people living in temporary accommodation. Software can be done reasonably quickly and one can buy and set up the processes needed to do it online, but it does require a reasonable level of competence. To permanently compromise a phone would require taking it apart and adding/changing components, that is not going to have happened. A factory reset will have solved any potential compromise. 

It would not need to have any physical components changed.

However doing it in 8 minutes and not wiping the data partition is highly unlikely as they would need to flash a compromised ROM to the device to make it survive a factory reset.

In the time they had it, worst likely case was to load some software onto the phone, be it a remote control app, a keyboard logger or something similar. A hardware refresh would have wiped that.

You will not require a new phone. For the absolute paranoid depending on the phone you could unlock the bootloader and reflash the OEM ROM onto it. But that is really not needed from what you have described.

That's great thanks I really appreciate it 👍 

dowling71

dowling71 said:

400ixl said:

MattMattMattUK said:

dowling71 said:

Hi thanks for that I suppose what I'm asking is what physical access would they have needed to permanently compromise the phone?

The kind of people of permanently compromising a phone are not the people living in temporary accommodation. Software can be done reasonably quickly and one can buy and set up the processes needed to do it online, but it does require a reasonable level of competence. To permanently compromise a phone would require taking it apart and adding/changing components, that is not going to have happened. A factory reset will have solved any potential compromise. 

It would not need to have any physical components changed.

However doing it in 8 minutes and not wiping the data partition is highly unlikely as they would need to flash a compromised ROM to the device to make it survive a factory reset.

In the time they had it, worst likely case was to load some software onto the phone, be it a remote control app, a keyboard logger or something similar. A hardware refresh would have wiped that.

You will not require a new phone. For the absolute paranoid depending on the phone you could unlock the bootloader and reflash the OEM ROM onto it. But that is really not needed from what you have described.

That's great thanks I really appreciate it 👍 

Just reading up on phone cloning, apparently that can take only a few minutes..but then that's still not permanent so phone OK 👌 👌 
Thanks everyone 🙏