Gadgetory

this episode of Android Weekly is brought to you by Full Sail University now although malware has been around for a long time and is a pain in the butt for sure there is a special place in hell for those who produce ransomware and it's on the rise but first off let's talk about what ransomware really is this specific kind of malware aims to take money from users by fooling them into willingly paying certain amounts of cash and in the most recent case that would be 500 bucks which is a significant amount of money it's also an Android lockscreen Trojan which means it can lock users out of their devices this ESET discovered malware goes by the name of Android locker pin and it's quite a nasty bug after successful infection the software were trying to fool you into granting it device administrative rights the trick here is that it does it in very sneaky ways in this case the administrator privilege page is overlaid with a fake window that claims to be a patch update of course in experienced users may fall for this and press Continue which would be very bad news indeed the device is now infected and this software has administrative rights over your phone it can even change your PIN number and lock you out of your smart phone but it gets worse after some time affected users will be presented with a window containing a fake FBI message that claims the user has been viewing prohibited pornographic material it also mentions he or she should pay a $500 fine for being involved in these quote criminal activities try to leave this message and the screen will be locked at this point the user cannot install Android locker PIN but only by doing so through safe mode or ADB but you are out of luck once Ransom activity has commenced as a randomly generated pin number will be put in place and successfully take away your access over the phone now what to do well first of all don't pay it not even the attacker can unlock the phone at this point the only way to recover access is to perform a factory data reset sure this may be a hassle to have to go through that whole process but honestly this is what we would recommend if you were infected in any case the crazy part is that the ransomware even has some defense mechanisms built in for example upon trying to disable administrative rights for Android locker pen the software will simply reactivate it in addition this trojan also tries to kill antivirus processes Wow now the vast majority of you are not going to have a problem with this because you're only downloading apps from the Google Play Store but if your sideloading apps from some mysterious source that is a risk now if you must download apps from someplace other than the Google Play Store make sure that source is trusted and you should be fine now when a curious note it turns out that 77% of ransomware victims from this particular ransomware are from the US I thought it would be the other way around so how many of you have been affected by ransomware have you been hit by this particular bug or another I'd like to hear about in the comments below let us know now if you knew me for my XD developer TV days you'd know that I interviewed hundreds of successful software developers and what became very painfully clear is that there is a serious gap between the theory that computer science engineering students learn and the practical knowledge needed to build a great app and that's the problem that our beloved sponsor Full Sail University is trying to address the mobile development bachelor's degree program offered on campus and online teaches students how to develop apps and utilities through courses that cover both iOS and Android development all students graduate with multiple completed software products and the web design and development bachelor's degree program also offered on campus and online teaches front-end design and back-end development along with coding formats programming languages and more all students have hands-on access to technology from day one they receive a laptop computer at an institutional discount along with relevant software and tools to learn more about full sales web and Technology programs visit Full Sail edu forward slash authority thanks for watching Android army my name is Jase love to connect with you right here on Google+ or Twitter you don't wanna forget about my brothers and sister and Android who are working super hard to viewer source for all things Android