HomeNewsIs your device affected by Gooligan?

Is your device affected by Gooligan?

Read through the story to check and resolve if your device has been affected.

In another round of malware attack, about one million Android devices have been affected by a new family of malware called Gooligan (read Hooligans), reports Check Point Software Technologies.
Gooligan
As per the report, Gooligan is found in at least 86 android apps available on third-party marketplaces. Check the list of apps here Third-party markets are everything except Google Play Store. As of now, the malware affects the devices running on Android Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, Kitkat, and Lollipop. Surprisingly, this amounts to about 74 percent of total Android devices.
Gooligan
Gooligan gets the root privileges by the process and then make the device download and install a particular software which helps hackers steal the authentication tokens. Post this, one can easily hack into your Google accounts without any password. Google accounts here refer to all Google services including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Play, Google Drive, Google Photos, and G Suite etc. Once a hacker has got into your Google services, he can steal and manipulate your data, you having no idea about it.
Gooligan
Based on the report, of the 1 million devices affected, 57 percent are found in Asia followed by Americas with 19 percent, Africa with 15 percent and Europe with 9 percent. Each day, about 13,000 devices are being affected with this malware. Also, this is possibly the first malware to hit the one million mark. Note, that for malware like ‘Quadrooter’, 900 million devices we at risk of getting affected but they were not actually affected.
Gooligan
Now, to know if your device has been infected or not, visit (https://gooligan.checkpoint.com/). Also, if it has been infected then Checkpoint recommends changing all Google account passwords immediately. Further, if this doesn’t solve your problem then you have to clean flash your operating system. Clean flash would mean going into Stock Recovery -> Wipe Data-> Wipe Cache Partition and reboot.

And of course, just to be precautionary we would advise you to not download apps from third-party sources. To protect your phone from doing it, go to Settings > Security > Disable ‘Unknown Sources’.

Thankfully, my Google account was not affected. Do check your device now and let us know in the comment section below.

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