HELP! I think my android phone has been hijacked!

krazemonkey

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Sep 6, 2014
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Hi all android centrallers,
I have an Nexus 4 running latest android OS 4.4.4 and I think my phone might have been hijacked. I dropped my phone about 1 or 2 months ago and basically my screen at the bottom have a crack which broke the touch sensor on the screen right where the soft buttons (back home and multitask) but the screen is still displaying. What happen was about somewhere around there i think, is when my phone starting to act like it has been remotely controlled by someone at many times. For example, i'm scrolling a chrome page, it would automatically press back, home or mutlitask on its own and one freaky thing that happened once only was, it kept autotyping in the chrome search bar and any text box i click on, and no not only a couple letters, it was typing all over the place and when i took my hand off the screen it looks like there is a ghost typing on it i could see all the finger press. Another occasion was that i was watching my youtube video on the app, and all it would suddenly pause on its own, and whenever i click play after 5 sec it pauses, then i restarted the app, play a video and it automatically minimize the video and start scrolling through my subscriber video list very fastly up and down and click on a totally different video. I was really shocked it seemed like it was actually a human who perform those actions. And many times those 3 soft button keep pressing on its own and i know its not me because my screen broke and i cannot even touch those 3 button.
I have heard that sometimes when your screen sensor breaks, it would press randomly on your screen etc.. but i have witness what the "ghost" have done to my phone and it seems like it is very humanly controlled. My phone is not rooted and i did not download any app outside of playstore except maybe flash which i got from the real adobe website.
Now i'm not sure whether to believe it is just a sensory that detects it wrong or someone is actually hacking my phone. The thing im afraid is that they've been watching and stealing my sensitive data all along without me knowing and maybe could hack the cameras too.
Just before this post, my phone was acting all weird up again (keep pressing one of those 3 buttons on its own). I left a Note message on the screen and let it stay on for a while, and few times i type in something like (WHO IS THIS?) etc, it would press the home button right after i left it there for a while. I am right now just leaving my phone ON with screen on to see if this would continues to act up on its own.
Anybody have gotten any advice for me? I am really worried and i do want to reset my phone but i have quite full of data on here that i do not want to lose.
Thank you in advance.
 

B. Diddy

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Welcome to Android Central! It's most likely that the phone is just malfunctioning due to the previous damage. if you're concerned about it being hijacked, you could try booting into Safe Mode, which should disable all 3rd party apps (including any malware): https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/2852139?hl=en

If you're still concerned, a factory reset ought to get rid of any potential intrusion. What kind of data do you have on there that hasn't already been synced to your Google account? You could install an app like Helium to do a backup first. Then, in Settings>Backup & Reset, uncheck "Automatically Restore," so that any potentially malicious app doesn't automatically reinstall after doing the reset.