My girlfriends S7 Edge was stolen in France and unbelievably she was contacted through the Embassy that it had been found!!! I couldn't believe it especially because the police was more than rude and didn't care at all at first.
Anyway, after an ordeal to get it back by mail without speaking french ourselves it is now here without the case. Plugging it in it came up in download mode. Rebooting brought the lockscreen back, but her pattern doesn't work and it's in French. However, there were still messages on the lockscreen, so I believe it may not have been wiped. But no idea why it is in french now and why the lock pattern doesn't work.
Apparently one can set a temporary password through device manager, but problem 1 both wifi as well as mobile data are disabled - I can't get to it through device manager. Problem 2 I can pull down quick settings, but cannot activate either wifi nor data. Problem 3 I thought you can always get to the backup PIN entering a few wrong pattern, but that doesn't work either - only the delays increase.
There is no recovery installed or root. I may have enabled debug mode and read I could delete pattern.key via adb, however am not there right now.
Any other ideas? I wonder who changed the phone to french and download mode. Could be the police (because they found GF and there was no name on the phone) or the thief. The SIM was missing, if the thief threw away the SIM the police must have accessed the phone.
Any other ideas? I absolutely don't want to go wipe just yet, but without the phone connecting to either wifi or data there is no hope through google. We can call it with the replacement SIM.
Any way to get out of the pattern and to enter the PIN? Doesn't a PIN always have to be set when a pattern is set?
Would adb deleting of the pattern file actually work?
Google how to bypass passwords you'll find help in d results
Yeah, I did - had to do this recently restoring a TWRP backup when my pattern suddenly didn't work any more - even though I used the same pattern on the older version and thought I deleted everything. It must have stored this stuff outside the data, system or boot partitions.... weird.
Anyway unfortunately it looks like the thief got access and deleted everything, that's why it's in french. So the only way for the police to identify the owner must have been the IMEI - there is nothing left but creepy selfies of the thief - tons of them.
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This issue has been addressed and no actual cause has been determined.
My pin lock pad which I usually use is replaced by a keyboard for no reason and my pin doesn't work anymore.
it keeps asking me for a password and after every 5 attempts I get a 30 seconds countdown.
To add insult to injury trying to restart the computer boots me into download mode.
It's very frustrating to say the least. Fortunately I have a twrp backup that I can restore but it's such a waste of time.
Has anyone else had this happen to them?
mrnovanova said:
This issue has been addressed and no actual cause has been determined.
My pin lock pad which I usually use is replaced by a keyboard for no reason and my pin doesn't work anymore.
it keeps asking me for a password and after every 5 attempts I get a 30 seconds countdown.
To add insult to injury trying to restart the computer boots me into download mode.
It's very frustrating to say the least. Fortunately I have a twrp backup that I can restore but it's such a waste of time.
Has anyone else had this happen to them?
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Not happening to me. but anyone who knows how to deal with this. So, just in case happened to us, we know what to do.
hemander said:
Not happening to me. but anyone who knows how to deal with this. So, just in case happened to us, we know what to do.
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Useless posts just to raise your post count are all over this forum, seriously if you cant offer anything remotely helpful why post at all? Also put your tongue back in!
OP can you extrapolate how to arrive at the issue and also please state device model, device status etc?
Are you using an application to set/unset your PIN?
I had this happening to me repeatedly, however it was accepting my PIN as the password so was more just annoying that anything else.
After some experimenting I found that it was Secure Settings (setting the PIN) that seemed to be the cause - somehow it was setting the PIN correctly the first time it ran and then subsequently it would switch to password.
I ditched it and instead setup my set/unset PIN via Pebble Locker (also using Wifi and other bluetooth devices to set/unset PIN).
After using it for a few days successfully, it locked once setting a password instead of PIN, and this time my usual PIN failed to unlock it. Luckily it was about 11pm and I knew that it would automatically unlock at about 7am the next day when the wifi was automatically switched back on - so I didn't need to reset or anything (although I got the impression at the time that you could unlock it via going to your google account somehow - but I can't recall the details and may have this entirely wrong).
I setup a Tasker profile so that I'd have a backdoor to disable the PIN by plugging it into power and checking if I'm at home at the time. Not the most secure solution, but hardly wide open either.
I'm having the same issue and it also appears to be a quirk with Secure Settings. Actually locked me out of my phone yesterday, had to return home where I had task to unlock phone in order to get back in.
NinjaBuzz said:
I'm having the same issue and it also appears to be a quirk with Secure Settings. Actually locked me out of my phone yesterday, had to return home where I had task to unlock phone in order to get back in.
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Click to collapse
I've had this exact issue with Secure Settings
Solved (how can I add that to the title?)
Verizon Galaxy S5, rooted and running 4.4.4
I had a weird and unsettling incident today. I had my phone set up for pattern unlock. I pulled my phone from my pocket and it was on a pin unlock screen. I was unable to get it to go back to pattern unlock, even with pulling the battery. As so often happens when I'm ambushed with a password requirement (the old pattern unlock didn't require a pin), I couldn't remember it. I'm sure I'll remember it eventually but I needed to have navigation right then so I had to do the reset, lost some stuff, nothing too important (old factory reset didn't used to wipe the SD so I lost some stuff there too). Mostly annoying but neither here nor there really. I always assume that anything on my phone is volatile.
So that was that. I assumed my phone had pocket-swiped and got caught in a pin fallback. Except I'm playing with my phone now and I'm unable to duplicate the effect. I have a pattern set and a pin behind it but playing with it and getting the pattern wrong doesn't lock me into having to enter the pin. If I get the pattern wrong several times, I get prompted with forgot pattern (which prompts me for my google account info) or backup pin (which prompts me for my pin but allows me to hit the back arrow to go back to the pattern).
If it helps, I did not have encryption on this device. It was not new when I got it so I had performed a factory reset so it should have been in exactly the same state. Can anyone help me understand how I got locked into this "having to enter a pin" state?
[Edit: I just tried enabling the pin lock screen and it is different from the screen that I saw which was more like the "backup pin" screen]
As an additional question, I see there is an option to disable the auto factory reset. If you disable it, what are your options for if you forget your passwords? How would you reset the device?
Edit2: OK, the clue was in there. If the auto factory reset is disabled, you are able to go back and forth between the pattern unlock and the pin unlock. If the auto factory reset is enabled, you jump to the pin unlock and then you get 10 chances at the pin and there is apparently no way to get back to the pattern unlock. I'll reserve comment on whether having the auto factory reset enabled as the default is a good idea or not.
Just as an additional note, I just checked and it is not possible to unlock the device from the android device manager when it has a pattern lock or pin lock screen set
This just happened to me after the tenth try and fail it wiped the whole internal and external cards and went in to boot loop I had to reflash the rom best thing to do is turn off the phone boot to safestrap and restore a back if you go through with the 10 tries at least pull your memory card before the 10th try
Sent from my SM-G900V using XDA Free mobile app
It looks like a good answer I found was that if you load up the play store on a browser on a PC, there is an app you can install that will unlock your device. Pretty smart (though not cheap [edit: actually pretty cheap, just not free]). I did need the nav but if I had known of this app, I probably would just have asked directions. I definitely should have pulled the sd card anyway.
Here is the link to the app. There is also a free version which does less. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.thomascannon.screenlockbypass.pro
Other useful info available here
http://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/ho...u-bypass-android-pattern-lock-screen-0138807/
Hello guys. During setup my 6p asked me about having the pin checked before booting android itself. Am I correct in assuming having this on will stifle android device manager's ability to locate lock or wipe the phone in the event it is lost or stolen seeing how the rom never boots until the pin is entered. Seems super safe but at the expense of losing any chance of recovering it should it be stolen and still connected to data or lost by me.
RngrYogi said:
Hello guys. During setup my 6p asked me about having the pin checked before booting android itself. Am I correct in assuming having this on will stifle android device manager's ability to locate lock or wipe the phone in the event it is lost or stolen seeing how the rom never boots until the pin is entered. Seems super safe but at the expense of losing any chance of recovering it should it be stolen and still connected to data or lost by me.
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Click to collapse
I don't know about remote finding and lock but I can tell you I had it for a little while and then when I loaded the last pass app it said I had to disable it for that to work so I did because I love LastPass
Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk
Yes, if you have the option for requiring PIN to boot enabled, the device will never fully boot into Android and you would not be able to track it. The upside is that the thief would not be able to use the phone until that PIN is entered.
Hey there,
my Lenovo P2 recently got stolen and now that I've ordered a used S8 I am looking into ways to protect against theft. And frankly I don't see a good way.
The most obvious thing a thief will do is to shut down the phone and throw away the sim card, so I looked for ways to defend against that. You can't deactivate the force shutdown by holding the power button for 10 sec, which sucks, but the Cerberus app can do a pretend shutdown, which is at least something.
But what about removing the sim card? Without sim card there is no internet connection and therefore no tracking app will work. And once there is no tracking the thief has all the time in the world to find a way to reset your phone and bypass SFR. Well, nothing you can do about that.
But can you defend against a factory reset? Make Cerberus a system app and it works even after a reset! Sounds great, I thought! BUT, in order to do just that you have to root your phone, meaning unlocking the bootloader, meaning the thief can just flash your entire phone through the bootloader. He might not, but he can. Making all the work in rooting and preparing pretty useless if it's not even secure.
So I'm asking, is there any way to secure against theft? I have the idea of making the phone ring when it looses connection to my bluetooth headphones, but that can backfire so easily...
I'm open for any ideas. Hope there is something out there I've missed.
same question!!
1. You have to input pattern/password if you would like to power off the device locked.
2. As far from what I've seen with my friend's S7 Edge, you will need to sign in with your google account if you forced factory reset it in recovery not sure about odin flashing.
3. I'm not sure about this but as long as Location is turned on it can still be tracked even without an internet connection. Again, I'm not sure but I think iPhones have this feature so maybe it can be done on Android too.
Hope the little infos help. Cheers
I've had the Cerberus app since my Nexus 5 days and it's pretty useful.
Regarding shutting down my s8 by holding the power button, Cerberus just does the fake shutdown screen off thing. Also there's an option in Cerberus to disable the power menu when on the lockscreen, which I have enabled. I think the only way to actually shut down my s8 from the lockscreen is for the battery to die on it's own
As for the data and sim card, the app recognizes the original sim card. So if someone puts in a different sim card, the app sends a notification to your email or spouses phone. I think it sends location data too but I'm not sure. And data is accessed thru any sim card. My phone WiFi is set to on all the time anyways so Cerberus will look for any open network and communicate thru that. However, the pull down menu is still accessible in the lockscreen. But on the s8, there's a setting to lock the pulldown menu buttons so u wanna make sure that's turned on.
And for defending against hard resets, like i mentioned earlier the phones power menu is blocked, so they won't be able to start the process until the battery dies by itself
Sent from my SM-G950U1 using Tapatalk
cdigga101 said:
I've had the Cerberus app since my Nexus 5 days and it's pretty useful.
Regarding shutting down my s8 by holding the power button, Cerberus just does the fake shutdown screen off thing. Also there's an option in Cerberus to disable the power menu when on the lockscreen, which I have enabled. I think the only way to actually shut down my s8 from the lockscreen is for the battery to die on it's own
As for the data and sim card, the app recognizes the original sim card. So if someone puts in a different sim card, the app sends a notification to your email or spouses phone. I think it sends location data too but I'm not sure. And data is accessed thru any sim card. My phone WiFi is set to on all the time anyways so Cerberus will look for any open network and communicate thru that. However, the pull down menu is still accessible in the lockscreen. But on the s8, there's a setting to lock the pulldown menu buttons so u wanna make sure that's turned on.
And for defending against hard resets, like i mentioned earlier the phones power menu is blocked, so they won't be able to start the process until the battery dies by itself
Sent from my SM-G950U1 using Tapatalk
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Click to collapse
MoveJoe said:
Hey there,
my Lenovo P2 recently got stolen and now that I've ordered a used S8 I am looking into ways to protect against theft. And frankly I don't see a good way.
The most obvious thing a thief will do is to shut down the phone and throw away the sim card, so I looked for ways to defend against that. You can't deactivate the force shutdown by holding the power button for 10 sec, which sucks, but the Cerberus app can do a pretend shutdown, which is at least something.
But what about removing the sim card? Without sim card there is no internet connection and therefore no tracking app will work. And once there is no tracking the thief has all the time in the world to find a way to reset your phone and bypass SFR. Well, nothing you can do about that.
But can you defend against a factory reset? Make Cerberus a system app and it works even after a reset! Sounds great, I thought! BUT, in order to do just that you have to root your phone, meaning unlocking the bootloader, meaning the thief can just flash your entire phone through the bootloader. He might not, but he can. Making all the work in rooting and preparing pretty useless if it's not even secure.
So I'm asking, is there any way to secure against theft? I have the idea of making the phone ring when it looses connection to my bluetooth headphones, but that can backfire so easily...
I'm open for any ideas. Hope there is something out there I've missed.
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Click to collapse
Aemyiam said:
same question!!
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between cerebrus stock security factory reset protection and such you can locate and such but best wepon is imei
Write it down if all else fails report the imei to your carrier and have it blacklisted also....
I also use my gear s2 watch as the have a find phone/watch setup too.In the end A thief will do what it takes and can bypass most if not all security implemented by google or others best you can do is take all the precautions and be ready to pounce if its gone....
I've been using Cerberus for a couple of years now.
Had it installed on my S6 when it was "stolen" of my desk at the office one evening when we were working late.
I tracked the culprit in real time as he and his wife were driving on the highway 80km away.
While they were driving I took snapshots and listened to their conversations.
Luckily (for him) it was all just a mistake, he had a S6 too and merely took mine by mistake.
He gave it back the next day.
Still, IMHO, Cerberus is well worth the cost.
Protect against Flash
Since you have been using it by sometime do you have any protection agains flashing a new ROM ? Did you make a new partition or something ? Is there a tutorial ?
Thank you !
Henniesnijman said:
I've been using Cerberus for a couple of years now.
Had it installed on my S6 when it was "stolen" of my desk at the office one evening when we were working late.
I tracked the culprit in real time as he and his wife were driving on the highway 80km away.
While they were driving I took snapshots and listened to their conversations.
Luckily (for him) it was all just a mistake, he had a S6 too and merely took mine by mistake.
He gave it back the next day.
Still, IMHO, Cerberus is well worth the cost.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The only protection is the fake shutdown.
Thief thinks he shut down the phone meanwhile it's recording video.
Installing is straight forward. No partitioning required.
Running stock - I recently wiped and managed to forget my password. As you all know biometrics won't work upon a fresh reboot. Well, I tried all I could remember and had no success. I found a link to samsung accounts which will remote unlock. Great!
Except now when I boot the phone it's a black backdrop "Please input pw to 'turn on' device'" and can see it's automatically set into airplane mode. I can't access the notification bar, I can't send the unlock command......what can I do?
Do I have to seriously wipe again?
don't bother replying as the phone wiped itself. Piece of **** phone software is a hunk of garbage. One single restart locked the whole phone out from ALL connectivity. No wifi, no cell, no anything.
What is the god damn point of remote software to unlock, track, locate devices if ONE ****ING restart locks out the entire software suite? Knox is trash.