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More Than 1 Million Google Accounts Breached by Gooligan Malware

posted by takyon on Thursday December 01 2016, @02:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the droids-they-are-looking-for dept.

bitshifter writes:

Check Point reports that more than one million Google accounts were breached, and more than 13,000 accounts continue to be breached every day via compromised Android devices. http://blog.checkpoint.com/2016/11/30/1-million-google-accounts-breached-gooligan/

Our research exposes how the malware roots infected devices and steals authentication tokens that can be used to access data from Google Play, Gmail, Google Photos, Google Docs, G Suite, Google Drive, and more.

Check Point reached out to the Google Security team immediately with information on this campaign. Our researchers are working closely with Google to investigate the source of the Gooligan campaign.

The article also notes that Gooligan downloads a rootkit that takes advantage of multiple Android 4 and 5 exploits including the well-known VROOT (CVE-2013-6282) and Towelroot (CVE-2014-3153).

Historically, many comments were made about the dangers of monocultures, in particular the MS Windows monoculture. With the migration away from desktops to handheld devices, and with google dominating the field for both the platform (Android) and many services (GMail), there seems no reason not to believe that there'll be the same kind of monoculture-related issues for many more years.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Thursday December 01 2016, @04:05PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday December 01 2016, @04:05PM (#435485) Journal
    A simple mandate would be difficult. There's a better solution, which I've proposed to the Android Security Team: Give handset makers a, say, 5% share of revenue from Google Play for anything sold to a device that is completely up to date with all security updates. Apple takes a 30% cut of all apps, which means that they have a financial interest in ensuring that as many apps as possible run on as many devices as possible. The Android ecosystem doesn't have an equivalent, because the company that profits from up-to-date devices is Google and the companies that carry the cost of the updates are handset manufacturers. Basic security economics (the kind that we teach to undergrads) tells you that this will leave you with an insecure ecosystem.
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    sudo mod me up
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