It appears that there’s quite a bit of malware making its way into the Android Market lately, as apparently over the weekend another maleware threat was discovered, although as it seems quite frequent these days perhaps Android users shouldn’t be that surprised.
According to the guys over at Ubergizmo, this latest maleware is a variant of DroidDream Light and was discovered by My Lookout Blog, and they say that four Android apps published by a developer called “Mobnet” contained maleware that was almost identical to DroidDream Light.
Those four Android applications are, Quick FallDown, Bubble Buster, Best Compass & Leveler albeit there being a legitimate app available with the same name, and Scientific Calculator.
Apparently the above Android applications have been downloaded a minimum of 1000 times while some have apparently hit the 5000 downloads mark, so it looks like there could be quite a few Android smartphones already infected.
The word is this malware makes infected handsets visit certain URLs, which presumably are malicious and could possibly contain Trojans, initiate app downloads, update the malware itself and download apps.
Of course if you believe your Android device has been infected you’ll probably need to download a mobile security application to remove the malware and keep your device safe in future, and obviously the best way is to check out an app’s rating and reviews beforehand and keep away from 3rd-party application store, although obviously the malware is getting into the Android Market where one would think it would be detected immediately but there you go.
Personally I’m not a big downloader of mobile apps for my Samsung Galaxy S, so don’t really visit the Android Market via my smartphone too often, having said that, there are many that love apps and visit on a regular basis, so some common sense is needed when choosing which apps to download and install.
This new maleware found in the Android Market has apparently already been removed by Google and was the 3rd iteration of maleware created by the authors of DroidDream back in March with the second iteration discovered in June.