For a lot of us getting the full potential out of our phones means rooting them, experimenting with custom Kernels and in most cases custom builds of firmware in the form of ROMs – you can count me in that group as well and it irks me when manufacturers either make it difficult or near impossible to root or gain an unlocked bootloader – Motorola, you listening? Whilst I love to tinker as it’s just in my nature, I certainly don’t want manufacturers to leave the door as it were, unlocked for the average user.
Enter the ZTE Score – known as the ZTE Skate Internationally – the community far and wide noticed that this particular handset had left a fairly obvious and potentially dangerous backdoor to any that has the hard-wired password to the device access to the root partition enabling copying and writing of any data you please. This is the kind of backdoor stuff that is left in for development and improving the device during the testing stages. It’s also been reported by researchers that the international variant known as the Score – under the guise of the Monte Carlo on Orange in some countires. It’s a little troubling, however, to hear that MetroPCS and ZTE plan to use this to install bloatware – of course it seems unlikely that a carrier would try to pull such a move but, you never can know.
The backdoor was first discovered on pastebin here and thankfully there apparently working on a fix right now.