Wallpaper Crashes Android Smartphones; Send Them Into Reboot Loop

There’s a particularly malicious piece of code that’s been going around online. To be precise, it is “hidden away” in the form of wallpaper and once it has been downloaded, it perpetually crashes the devices and sends it into an endless boot loop.

The issue was first discovered by serial leakster Ice universe (@UniverseIce), who then blasted a PSA about the offending wallpaper via his official Twitter account. Upon hearing about it, several of his followers then proceeded to try it themselves and confirmed the issue’s authenticity. After sending their phones into an endless bootloop cycle.

WARNING！！！
Never set this picture as wallpaper, especially for Samsung mobile phone users!
It will cause your phone to crash!
Don't try it!
If someone sends you this picture, please ignore it. pic.twitter.com/rVbozJdhkL

— Ice universe (@UniverseIce) May 31, 2020

One of the draws of the wallpaper is its particularly vivid colours, which is what prompted Ice Universe to download it in the first place. However, after downloading and setting it as his wallpaper, he noticed that the colours being displayed on his phone was noticeably dimmer and then when his woes began.

According to local tech site NasiLemakTech (NLT), they say that the issue of the crash seems to stem from the wallpaper’s metadata and that its colour gamut is indeed the issue behind the crash. To put it into slightly more technical terms, NLT managed to scrub 8078 bytes of metadata from the image, the end result being the less vivid image of the original wallpaper.

The silver lining in this – if you can even call it that – is that this problem seems isolated to Android smartphones, regardless of brands. Specifically, the exploit only seems to be active on devices running on the Android 10 OS.

Sadly, if you’re phone happens to be a victim of the wallpaper, the only known fix right now is to do a hard factory reset of your phone. Yes, all the data on the phone will be wiped, but at the very least, you’ll have full control of your smartphone again.

(Source: Ice Universe via Twitter, NLT, Android Authority)

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