Zedo Adware Remains After Factory Reset on Stock ROM (Note 2)

l900user

New member
Apr 23, 2013
1
0
0
Visit site
I was intermittently seeing ads hosted by zedo.com appear in unopened tabs of the default browser on the AT&T Note 2 I just bought off of eBay. I previously saw this behavior on a different Note 2 (Sprint), but I assumed that was due to some bundled malware/adware in the custom ROM I was running on it. ODIN mode reports that this AT&T phone is "stock" (i.e., "CUSTOM BINARY DOWNLOAD: No" and "CURRENT BINARY: Samsung Official").

I manually deleted all the data in the internal storage and ran a factory reset, but the problem of the intermittent zedo ads in the browser remains.

1) From a technical perspective, how is this even possible with a stock ROM and a factory reset? Don't apps with even full permissions still not have access to the system settings and libraries (which I assume would be necessary to do this)? I am clearly not an Android developer, but I am a software developer with some working knowledge of Android.

2) What can I do to fix this?

Thanks!