Gooligan: The Latest Android Threat, Is your device Affected?

Viruses and Malware are the bane of our existence and it'll be pretty cool if they never existed, but yet here we are.

There's another one on the loose and this one is a bit of a doozie. It's estimated that around a million Android devices have been affected by this new malware called Gooligan.

Online reports state that Gooligan has been found in at least 86 android apps available on third-party marketplaces. Third-party markets are everything except Google Play Store. As of the time of filing this report, 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.

So how does Gooligan work? Well, it gets the root privileges by the process and then make the device download and installs a particular software which helps hackers steal the authentication tokens. Once this is achieved, a potential hacker could easily hack into your Google accounts without any password. Google accounts here refer to all Google services includingGmail, 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.

Photo Crd: Themobileindian.com

Breaking it down into stats, the devices affected were mostly found in Asia with an estimated 57 percent found. Then Americas with 19 percent, Africa with 15 percent and finally Europe with 9 percent. 

The stats also show that about 13,000 devices are being affected with this malware every single day. 

What makes Gooligan scary is it is possibly the first malware to have hit a million devices making it extremely dangerous.

With all this doom and gloom, i guess the next question is what can be done. If you want to find out your phone's status, just visit (https://gooligan.checkpoint.com/).

Once there, the checkpoint will recommend that you change all Google account passwords immediately. If that doesn't do the trick, then you have to clean flash your operating system. Clean flash would mean going into Stock Recovery -> Wipe Data-> Wipe Cache Partition and reboot.

I've checked mine and it seems i'm safe. You should do the same and make sure you avoid getting apps from anywhere other than the google playstore.