I have a Nokia Lumia 900 Windows 7.5 phone. Using the browser, I came across a number of sites and experienced a number of issues that confirm direct exposure to a Black Hole exploit site. I will describe the symptoms and experience below. What I am uncertain of is the impact of this exposure, whether or not and to what degree my device may be compromised and or the steps I should take to remedy the situation.
Multiple redirects - Clicking on a link from the Bing results page (most likely poisoned search results) I was redirected several times. On one occasion I landed on the tell take "Please wait....loading" Black Hole landing page. On another occasion I was taken to a scareware download site. Several sites I tried to back out of resulted in the appearance of the "Are you sure you want to leave?" dialogue box.
One one occasion I was dumped back to the google.com main page. I also discovered a google main page that resembled a "hopepage hijacked" spoofed google page. The graphic was counterfeit and all of the links appeared in the wrong place.
Another time I noticed that the phone type "nokia900" was included in part of the domain that appeared in the address bar as I was being redirected. I quickly backed out clicking several times before returning to the page of origin.
We know blackhole is out there. We know there are risks and consequences to landing on these types of pages. We know exploits for mobile phones are out there as well. What I don't know is what to do from here.
Ideally I would like to reinstall the operating system however I am not sure if this is possible. The phone is not jailbroken and I have no way of inspecting the files on the device. I have reset the phone several times. There is an ongoing irregular behavior I have noticed since the exposure.
After resetting the phone, a search query from the address bar in Internet Explorer produces the expected result from Bing under the Web tab. After a few more searches from the address bar, all search results immediately switch from the web tab to the image tab. Regardless of the search term, any search initiated from the address bar defaults to image results.
Not sure if that is caused by some persistant memory issue or if that is the quirky nature of Bing but it is new and inconsistent with how it behaves after I reset the phone.
Any thoughts or advice is appreciated. PS, I think this Black Hole issue could be the end of search as we know it. Who can you trust?
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