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With the arrival of Android 7.1 Google introduced a series of new features, some of which are still hidden today. The guys from XDA Developers have found one of them and have started to investigate how it works. This is a panic detection mode that would help us quickly exit a malicious application to return to the home screen without problem. The idea of this mode is that it would track the number of times we clicked on the back button.If the system finds that it has been pressed several times in a short period of time, it would kill the application and return to the home screen.
The panic mode function would allow you to return to the initial screen,even if the malicious application blocked the back button. Detection would depend on speed. It would be activated by pressing four times in less than three seconds, allowing you to return to the main screen. Once there we could eliminate that malicious app. The truth is that this very interesting mode is implemented in the Android code. However, it is not activated and, except for some ROMs that have been able to take advantage of it, it is normal that we do not have this function in our terminal.
A panic button for malware
The big question is: once we've installed a malicious app, how do they stop the back button from working? Basically, getting access permissions that allows applications to overwrite each other, blocking back to the main desktop. This function, therefore, could help at times when the user is left without knowing how to react.
The negative point, as we say, is that it is not accessible for now to users who have Android 7.1, which are few. According to the latest data, only one in ten users has Android 7.1 on their terminal. The problem is that when this version reaches a larger number of people, It is very likely that cybercriminals have already figured out how to bypass this Android “panic button”.
