What began as a simple root method has now spiraled to talk of a backdoor in ZTE devices. There is a flaw in some ZTE devices that can give root to any app that knows how to ask for it. For some users, this may sound cool because that means root is all that much easier to obtain, but one only needs to read between the lines to realize the risks involved.

The backdoor allows any application to obtain root with a simple password. Once the password is entered, the app is given full root privileges. This can include benevolent applications like Titanium Backup, but it could also include malware. The speculation by developers who have taken a look at the submitted code, including XDA Recognized Developer shabbypenguin and XDA Elite Recognized Developer jcase, is that ZTE left this enabled by accident as an engineering tool and simply forgot to remove it before releasing the affected devices. According to shabbypenguin:

problem is as you can see from teh pastebin all it requires is just a simple password and rooted shell is handed over...at this time there is no evidence to even support that this can even remotely being activated, however this is a big security concern regardless. for all intents and purposes this could be a debugging tool left in, however just seems oddly convenient for multiple software versions on separate phones on separate carriers

Naturally, word spread like wildfire and ZTE has promised to patch this giant security risk. However until then, the best piece of advice is to be very careful what you download because if the right piece of malware knows how to exploit this security hole, there's nothing you can do to stop it.

More information about the backdoor can be found on Reddit and Pastebin showing how the exploit works.