Baidu spyware found on a few Sony Xperia devices running KitKat firmware

Baidu is basically Chinese Google. The Chinese government has control over censorship in the country. These two individual facts do not mean your data is being harvested. For those that are paranoid beyond my reasoning, I’ll provide instructions to block this without root at the end of the post. For everyone else, please read on.

Currently people are getting excited about the fact that the Z3/Z3c are pinging a server in China and creating a Baidu folder in the internal storage which contains a rather large database of information. This was discovered to be caused by the myXperia app. The service begins pinging the server as soon as the network connection returns a “true” state (meaning connected). This is when the Baidu folder is created, even if you deleted it previously.

The myXperia service provides you with various features specific to your device. One of those is remote wipe functionality. In order to do this, the service needs to maintain a rather frequent check in to the home server to verify location data and device state among other things. This needs to happen even if the device is factory reset, since it sends a unique device identifier to the server to validate against any known devices reported stolen. Factory resetting your device would otherwise prevent the thief from being discovered and would render the service nearly useless. This is why it runs all the time.

The problem most people have is that the servers Sony are using happen to be in China for two obvious reasons. One reason is the low cost. I don’t think further explanation is needed here. The other reason would be to ensure that Chinese citizens can still use the service as well, since this sort of service must be hosted in the Chinese mainland for them to have access to it under Chinese law. This is for censorship purposes.

Another issue people have with this is that the service runs at boot time even if you don’t enable the myXperia service. This happens for the reason I listed before. If the device is factory reset and it doesn’t phone home, then the thief simply gets away with it. This prevents that from happening as best as can be helped by running from the time of initial setup.

Perhaps the choice of monitoring partner was poor, but there seem to be valid reasons beyond “OMG SONY WANTS MY TIN FOIL HAT”. Perhaps there is a bit of truth to that, but I doubt that this is malicious or anything more than a misunderstanding by the general public.

So, with all that in mind, do you still wish to allow this service to run on your device? If not, here’s how you prevent it from giving you anymore headaches.

1. Go ahead and backup anything you need and factory reset.
2. Remove your SIM card before powering back up.
3. Skip through the initial setup options without connecting to a network.
4. Open up Settings > Apps > Running and Force Close the two myXperia apps.
5. Use the File Commander app and delete the Baidu folder from the internal storage.
6. Open up Settings > About Phone > Tap the Build Number 7 times to enable developer mode.
7. Enable USB debugging in the Developer Settings.
8. Plug the Z3/Z3c into your PC and open up a command window with adb.
9. Enter the following lines into the command window.
   • adb shell
   • pm block com.sonymobile.mx.android
   • exit
   • reboot