‘Gooligan’ Virus Has Infect Your Android Phone
By Prempal Singh
A brand new variant of Android viruses dubbed ‘Gooligan’ is away, and spreading fast–by one estimate, it’s already contaminated more than 1 million smartphones and counting. Examine Point Software said cyber-terrorist target their victims by to take them to download a Gooligan-infected application from a third-party application store or to take them to click on a malicious link in a phishing message. When the virus is within, it can capable of rooting the user’s phone, stealing their email address and security password and using the phone’s security token to download new applications from Yahoo Play.
Check Point quotes the virus infects 13,000 Android phones and automatically downloads more than 30,000 applications each day. It targets phones operating Android 4 and 5, which together power almost three out of four Android phones in use today.
“This theft of over a million Yahoo account details is very alarming and represents another stage of cyber-attacks”, Check Point executive Michael Shaulov said in a press release. “We are seeing a shift in the strategy of hackers, who are now targeting mobile devices in order to obtain the sensitive information that is stored on them. ”
In an extended post on Google+, Adrian Ludwig, Google’s director of Android security, said the organization found no evidence that hackers had used taken usernames and passwords to data from people’s medical data. They also didn’t find evidence hackers are specifically targeting their victims–rather, they’re opportunistically targeting people with older Android systems with the goal of traveling application downloads for money.
Ludwig added Google has removed applications from Google Play Store that spread the virus and removed applications from developers who paid to get their software automatically attached to afflicted phones. Additionally, the organization terminated security tokens from impacted users and gave them instructions about how to restore control of their recommendations.
Fixing a phone which has been infected by Gooligan isn’t very easy. The software was designed to bury itself deep in the phone’s operating system and erase files in its wake up that could make the computer virus easy to find out and remove. People who suspect they already have been infected by the virus need to take their phone to an authorized service center for a process called re-flashing.
Source: bizjournals.com