Oneplus pre-installs a dangerous application on their mobiles

OnePlus is preparing to present the OnePlus 5T this week in New York. But, the Chinese brand is the protagonist today for completely different reasons. An application developed by Qualcomm has been detected on their phones that obtains administrator permissions with great ease. A fairly serious security problem.

OnePlus pre-installs a dangerous application on their mobiles

The app appears to have the power to take advantage of those privileges. Because by accessing the system root, you can take advantage of this vulnerability. Or third parties could make use of it. This is EngineerMode, developed by Qualcomm and present on OnePlus phones.

EngineerMode: Application that can be dangerous

It is an application that is responsible for testing the system. It has been preinstalled on the firm's phones for a long time. Although until now it has not been possible to demonstrate the risk involved. It is vulnerable to attack. The back door left by the application allows access to OnePlus administrator permissions with relative ease. Also, in a clean way and without the need to unlock the bootloader.

It seems that OnePlus was not aware of the possible risks when they installed EngineerMode. But that the application has access to administrator permissions is undoubtedly a risk. Although, strange as it sounds, an advantage has also been discovered. A very simple way has been obtained to root brand phones without having to unlock the bootloader.

Apparently, any application that is installed on a brand phone could easily obtain administrator permissions. OnePlus will surely respond to this situation in the next few hours, or launch an update to protect users. It is certainly a problem that must be solved as soon as possible.