Google Removes 10 Malware Apps From Android Market

Xuxian Jiang who is a professor at North Carolina State University found 10 apps from 3 different developers that were infected with a new type of malware that are being dubbed as “Plankton” in the Android Market.

Despite the frequent occurrences of malware being found in Android apps, at least Google was quick enough to spot them and remove them from the Android Market on the same day itself. For those curious, or for those who may have unfortunately downloaded said apps, the apps were mostly Angry Birds cheats and hacks, and unlike the previous malware apps it did not require Super User or root permissions to upload the user’s phone information to a remote server.

If you happened to have downloaded one of those apps perhaps you should remove it from your device as soon as possible. Either way good on Google for being so efficient about this, but perhaps instead of being reactive, Google should start looking into being preventive and save their users the trouble of having to download anti-virus apps for their phones.