Gooligan Infects Older Versions of Android

Read an update from CheckPoint Software on Gooligan. This is some malware that compromises Google data access. You get infected by downloading fake apps onto your Android device. This affects versions 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich, Jellybean, Kit Kat) and 5 (Lollipop) of Android .

The kicker is that the fake apps come from third party app stores. You would not find these in the Google Play store. I see that there are a couple of themes in the fake apps that infect you:

• Sex stuff (sex photo app, sex cademy app, and sexy hot wallpaper)
• Games (HTML5 games, snake, slots mania)
• Tools (wifi enhancer, GPS, youtubeplayer, calculator)

The apps download a rootkit. Then they do nasty things such as download other apps and even rating them on Google Play. The fix is to get some antivirus software pronto. And prevent it in the first  place by steering clear of third party app store. You never know what you are getting.

Crooks Getting Smarter

I logged into an old email account of mine recently. Saw a spam message from a few years ago. The thing was really good. Official looking return address at the top. No grammatical errors. Lots of specific numbers cited. Bitmap signature. Link to an official web site. Damn.


The real question is why are they sending me this spam? Are they trying to get some personal details out of me for a further hustle? Seems like a lot of hard work went into crafting this email. The only things that were sketchy were that the contains were all contained in a jpeg image, and they were telling me I won a lottery that I did not enter.


Crooks are getting better at running their scams. Watch out and warn your peoples.

The Cisco Command Line Interface

I have been digging in deep lately, trying to learn networking basics. Down at OSI layer 2. Studying how switches work in minute detail. Moving up to understand how routing works at OSI layer 3 as well. There is a lot going on.


Got access to a simulator. I can pretend to log into Cisco switches and routers. Access them through a command line interface (CLI). The problem is that there is a whole language I got to learn. It also feels like a wonky version of MS-DOS.


Just when I thought all was lost, I got ahold of a "cheat sheet" full of Cisco commands. I was off to the races ... until I discovered the cheat sheet was locked. It was distributed in the form of a PDF. But the file had security turned on, and I could not even print out the damn thing.


Well PDFUnlock came to the rescue. My file was a small one. PDFUnlock let's you break the password for free online. That's a good URL to have if you get into a bind like I Was. All right. Watch out world. I am gaining networking power as we speak.