Gaurav Gupta's Blog

And believe it or not, it comes in the form of a mobile application. And just like a truly committed life partner, it swears that it will never leave you alone, come what may. Read on:

I got an N70 mobile phone a year ago. Nokia’s N series had just been launched and N70 was considered one of the best value for money phone’s that time. Naturally, I was pretty possessive about it. Losing the phone would have been a nightmare, so obviously I wanted some kind of “theft protection” even though I believed that it would be next to useless in case of an actual theft situation.

I came to know about an application called “Guardian”. The application claimed that it can authenticate only certain SIM’s to work on the phone and if an unauthenticated SIM is entered, it starts sending secret SMS’s in the background to a pre-specified number, thereby revealing the number of the new owner and his (her?) location.

A few months later, I decided to give away the phone to my sister, for I had built up the temptation to buy a bigger-better-meaner phone for myself. Naturally as one would expect, I copied away my contacts, cleared my messages, restored the factory settings and formatted the memory card. Just to be extra careful, I did a hard reset of the phone.

After few days of use, my sister started to report that her prepaid balance is going down day by day, even when she is not using the phone. I was baffled. Since she’s one of those budding experimenters, I was almost sure that she has unknowingly triggered some service for which she is getting charged. But she confirmed that it is not the case.

Next day, she got a call from someone claiming that he’s getting weird messages on his cell from her number. Imagine getting 100 messages a day saying “Gaurav’s phone stolen. Thief is using this number!”. I quickly figured out that somehow the Guardian application is the culprit here. But how? I had formatted all data before giving her the phone. I could not trace any instance of Guardian running on her phone, nor was the application showing up in her running processes.

After losing hundred’s of rupees on useless SMS’s being sent continuously in the background, I finally resorted to checking Guardian’s website and manual, just to confirm if I had misconfigured something while installing it in the first place.

I came to know that the application has some advanced “shadow copy” mechanism which protects the application from being erased even during a full format or a hard reset! Whew! The solution – Put in the SIM which was in use when the application was installed, and only then would Guarding show up under the list of installed apps. Luckily, I was still using the SIM. And I did that right away. Guarding was uninstalled and everyone took a sigh of relief. One heck of an application I thought… but all was well that end’s well.

But it wasn’t the end by any means. Here’s how:

Again after a few months, my sister started reporting that her prepaid balance has started going down again. What the heck! I exclaimed. This time, I was ready to bet anything that it is indeed a case of configuration gone wrong by the budding experimenter. But again, she strongly opposed that it wasn’t.

I tried to figure out many things, even convincing myself to the extent that some virus had gone into her SIM card and that she had to now buy a new number. She was incharge of calling the customer care and threatening the customer care executives to tell her the reason why her balance was getting down. We all were on a mission.

Ultimately, it boiled down to the last thing I wanted to accept – Guardian. No matter how much I wanted to, I ultimately had to examine this option. And like before, I put my SIM into her phone again – and Voila! Guardian was there again! Back in action!

Now this new mystery – how did it get back? Here is the answer: I used to own 2 memory cards for my N70. Even though the application installs itself in the main memory, it creates a copy on the memory card. If you load a Guardian containing memory card in the phone, the application will load back itself into the phone.

When I removed the application from her cell that day, I was unaware of this fact. So when she used the other memory card some days back, the application got reinstalled, and obviously since her SIM was not in the “authenticated” list, the application again started firing hundred’s of SMS’s.

Now that I have managed to remove it from both memory cards, my sister is still in doubt if it has really gone away completely. Has it come in my own phone through the SIM? Sounds silly? You never know what Guardian can do!

Whew! What an application that was. And that too for free! Wonder how unlucky a thief would consider himself with an application like Guardian on the mobile he stole…