By Tristian Villegas, Courier Staff Writer
Hackers have accessed over 1.3 million Google accounts containing photos, email documents, and more. They infected these Android phones through illegitimate apps that are available at the app store. Google confirmed on Wednesday that people’s accounts have been breached. The hackers have managed to steal digital “tokens” that give them access to Google services, such as a person’s email and photo collection, but according to Google, hackers have not yet tapped that information and stolen it. The hackers are saying that this is why people shouldn’t download legitimate apps online. Google says it has blocked 150,000 versions of these kind of nasty cyberattacks. However, the problem is that 13,000 devices are infected and breached daily according to Checkpoint researches who have been tracking these types of cyber attacks since last year. They’ve nicknamed the hacking campaign “Gooligan.” and set up a website, Gooligan.checkpoint.com, for people to see if their devices have been hacked. Smartphone owners are advised to only download certified computer programs from official repositories. Google has its Google Play store and Apple has its Apple Store.
But there are others that insist on visiting unofficial app stores — typically on shady websites because they offer free, counterfeit versions of popular apps. Although it may be worth downloading that app and having unlimited things on those apps, at the end of the day it maybe to worth to just pay that 99 cents instead of having your whole phone and personal items be breached into and hacked. If you want to know what apps may have been hit, the website is Gooligan.CheckPoint.com