Question about android.permission.READ_LOGS

[ConcernedGuy]

So I have a question, and I've read around and not found any information that makes me any more or less paranoid. Long story short, a friend of mine installed some apps on my phone while he was using it. I had never heard of one of them and checked the permissions and one of them was:

android.permission.READ_LOGS

The only information I could find was from android.com which said:

"Allows an application to read the low-level system log files. Log entries can contain the user's private information, which is why this permission is not available to normal apps."

I know this app has no reason to be doing that. I suspect it to be malicious. It's a piracy app I think and I'm not gonna mention it's name because I don't know if that's allowed. Once I discovered this I wiped my phone(factory reset, wipe cache, wipe dalvik), everything on my SD card except my music and video and picture directories. I restored everything from a Nandroid I had thankfully made a few days earlier.

I don't use my phone as a phone, the carrier has no service here anyway(I bought it on ebay and have never registered it in my name), but I use it on wifi as a mini computer. I do do things like online banking and shopping on it, as well as usual email/games type stuff. What I wanna know is what sort of data could have been obtained if my friend had ran this app?

I'm not an android expert by any measure, but I do have a degree in computer science and am very security conscious so just in case, I changed all of my passwords for every single thing I've ever accessed from my phone.

And also, just because I feel the need to say it: I don't pirate stuff. I'm not a rich person by anyone's means, in fact I'm very poor. But android stuff is cheap. So there is no reason.

Any help is appreciated!

 

[funkylogik]

Just uninstalling it should have removed any potential threats mate and the fact that youve done a full reset i think means you have nothing to worry about. Android malware is nowhere near as advanced as on PCs yet and a lot of the time, scary lookin permissions have a very harmless reason to be there. Youre right to worry about side-loaded apps though unless theyre trusted and by respected devs. You can uncheck "unknown sources" in Security settings to keep yourself safe :thumbup:

 

[ConcernedGuy]

Well I do sideload apps from time to time simply because I have a bunch of backed up apks from transferring between devices. As I said before I only use this on Wi-Fi but I take it with me to use for portable entertainment and so away from home I have no market access. So if I need one of my old apps it'd be out of luck until I got home. And me myself checks all the permissions and whatnot so I know what I've got is okay. And sometimes there are legit other reasons to side load like I if you want to install an older version because an update broke the app for your device. A family member once had her identity stolen through social engineering once too, albeit not related to a smartphone. But that makes me even more careful. I should have known better... that same guy got my pc infected way back in the days of GAIN malware and such. Wow that made me feel old. Anyway, thank you, that made me feel better!