Before I get into this I'd like to avoid being treated like an idiot. I spent years as a PC technician, made my way up to Sr. Unix Admin, It Manager and IT director all along the way using more OS's than people on the internet can argue about. I've been around the block.
My iPad has malware on it. I don't know if it would properly be called a virus or a trojan but it is a google redirector just like the Windows computers have, and no my iPad has never been hacked, broken or placed in the hands of russian hackers. The only non-store app that has ever been on it has been my own, that is now actually in the store.
The malware started off as a redirect to askthecrew.net. Basically you would google something, click on a result and if you clicked on wikipedia - it would still send you to askthecrew.net. I did some research and it looks like it can do more than redirect on the PC - it can steal personal info. Not sure...
Either way I rebooted, cleaned out the cache, that sort of basic thing and it looked like it went away. I no longer get sent to askthecrew.com - no - I can get to the pages I want when I click through google.
Except - it always sends me to creditpuma.com first (the actual URL is creditpuma.com/feed.php) and quickly shuffles me off to the page I wanted to go. I'm assuming this action tracks all sorts of good stuff about me, my habits, and likely gives them a lot of traffic with which to artificially value their domain when they sell it....
Again this only happens when javascript is turned on. When it's off, the thing works like it should.
(Which you should remember before you suggest maybe my router was hacked - that and neither my mac or windows laptop will redirect like this. Plus, I wouldn't see the redirect in the address bar.)
Right now I bet your advice is "Reset it to factory settings" which I "did" twice. I put "did" in quotes there because it's really not factory settings if it boots up with IOS 5 is it?
It is REALLY not factory settings when I don't do a restore and it's essentially untouched by old data - and it still has the old javascript corruption!
So Apple - welcome to your first really good virus. You have made your stuff so secure that the genius at your store had no clue how to help me, other than telling me to reset and restore, because he can't reinstall Safari or JS from scratch. Your security has crippled my iPad because I no longer trust it with any real data (that I use for finance and business) so yay!
So yes I walked it into the Apple store, and yes I was told to reset it, and yes I did reset it, once with a restore and once without the restore treating it like a new iPad. I tried to call customer care, but it's $30 for the call and, well it would be like me helping Apple figure out how to giant security hole and me paying for the privledge to do so. I was told all software issues are free at the store anyway... but I guess that jsut reflects the quality of the service as my advice didn't help. Oh and I did call back, they told me to try recovery mode. How that would help is beyond me as my device has no problem restoring..
So does anyone have any advice on fixing this - or actually resetting this back to actual, for realsies, factory settings that do not have corrupted javascript, is not IOS 5, doesn't still have my old account info as suggestions when try to set it up as a new ipad?
Or - anyone here work for Google's Android division? I'm not cheap but I'll gladly do a commercial with my infected, unfixable iPad! 🙂
(BTW - yes this post is filled with keywords so that others with this problem can find this post as it was nearly impossible to find someone who had a similar problem - and I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that if Alee11 looks closely he sees his google searches redirected briefly as well. but maybe not, his infection is a few months older... )