Virus on Lenovo P1M? My phone, a two year old Lenovo Vibe P1M, has been acting weird for a while. 

It was damaged six months back in an accident, and the screen was somewhat cracked on the top. As a result the touchscreen got kind of faulty. But there were no performance issues.

For about a month, though, I've been experiencing huge problems!


Extreme lag and freezes.
The phone started randomly opening apps and messing around with them. 
I found several audio recordings made without my knowing. 
I found a lot of "empty" folders on the internal storage, and when I deleted these it freed up about 500 MB. One such folder was called "diaxin." I also got alerts from my CleanIt app asking me if I wanted to remove residual junk files. When I hit yes, it showed me a huge bunch of files with Chinese names. Needless to say, I had not downloaded any of them.
Worst of all, every few seconds, the phone opened the toolbar containing the icons for my WiFi, Data Connection, etc. Somehow it kept turning on my location. I tried scrolling up to hide the toolbar but no luck. Every time, I had to switch the phone off and on to get rid of this annoyance.
The touchscreen often stopped responding at random times, including when I tried to unlock my phone. Right now it takes me 5-7 tries to even get the phone to recognize my attempts to draw my pattern. 


I tried to connect the phone via data cable to Ubuntu so I could backup the data. It just froze when I did so, and froze my laptop as well. I had to restart both devices. 

What kind of malware infestation is this? I'd like to do a factory reset but can't because my contacts etc are on the phone (and it's not letting me back them up: see 5 and 6).
Try rebooting into Safe Mode. If its a 3rd party app messing with your phone then it won't work on Safe Mode. Then try backing up your data and resetting the phone.