Samsung Galaxy S5 Mysteriously Rooted (According to Knox Indicator)?

[Stampede0911]

Hi everyone,

I have a Galaxy S5 that was bought less than a year ago, and recently it has encountered some problems. The whole system crashes multiple times, eventually leading to the phone refusing to boot up (or stuck on the 'Galaxy S5" screen, then freezing). Since the phone is still under warranty, I brought it into a Samsung service centre to be fixed. After the first service, it seemed to be fine, however a few days later the same problems started to flare up again. So, I brought it back into the service centre, under the premise that it would be fixed again since it’s still within the one year warranty. However, the service centre tells me that the repairs to my phone were not covered under the warranty.

The reason was that the phone was rooted, and they showed me the exact text under the Odin mode:
Knox warranty void: 0x1 (1)
(Where a 0 means that the phone is not rooted, and a 1 means a root).

My main issue with this is that there is no way I performed a root on the phone, because it is an advanced process that I do not know how to do. I never checked this indication and whether it was rooted or not, because I strongly believe that I never touched anything that would cause the phone to be rooted. In addition, I don’t think that a phone can be rooted accidentally…

With that said, I am wondering if there is any way that somehow, the Knox warranty indicator was inadvertently changed to say that the phone was rooted?

I should also add that after the first repair, the service centre re-flashed the software back onto the phone, and I read online that if a custom software was used, it could lead to the Knox being triggered. Would it be possible that the re-flash caused the Knox indicator to be triggered?

Otherwise, is there any particular reason as to why the indicator would show that my phone was rooted, even though I am absolutely certain that I did not root the phone, or make any modifications to the software? Or is there any way to prove otherwise when I am dealing with Samsung?

Any help and/or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[PoppyHotter]

I am exactly in the same situation,
my note 5 started acting up in the middle of the day and started rebooting itself every 5 minutes. i took it to the service and they said first they cant touch it as note 5 never officialy released in the UK. SO i took it to an independent repair centre where i have been told the phone is rooted. knox warranty void indicator ( 0x1 ) i only downloaded apps from the google play store so i am all clueless. I was thinking if actually the security software NOD32 i purchased on play store may have done something to the phone.

my question is, did you manage to get to the bottom of this case and get a warranty repair?

thanks

 

[bencetari]

First, softwares like NOD32 CAN'T ROOT ANYTHING. On samsung devices (most of them). Even rooting apps like king root and towel root fails. Rooting without PC needs a vulnearbility of the system WHAT SAMSUNG FIXES ALL THE TIME. So, NOPE. Apps Can't root samsung phones. They can root huaweis but samsung fixed these vulnerabilities in their updates. So, I don't really have any idea about what happened. if you didn't flash anything on i either in stock recovery. Your knox flag should be 0x0. Apps can't root. Stock recovery with a simple factory reset Doesn't trip knox. And even stock odin rom flashing doesn't trip it. Maybe tell them to look at the binary statuses. If it says official and you have stock recovery and stock rom. AND if superuser or supersu says "NO SU BINARY FOUND". Then you are not rooted. Maybe a virus was trying to use a vulnerability to get root access and maybe this caused the reboots (the vrus was rooting it while it was rebooting). So in this case. You can't do much except paying.