Xuxian Jiang, an assistant professor in computer science at North Carolina State University, last week found 10 applications infected with malware in the Android Market. On June 5, he reported it to Google, which suspended the applications on the same day. Jiang also contacted mobile anti-virus companies and research labs, including Lookout, Symantec, McAfee, CA, SmrtGuard, Juniper, Kinetoo, Fortinet, and others.

What is this latest threat?

In a blog post published last week, Jiang explained that this new malware, which his team named "Plankton" (after the pesky Spongebob character?) doesn't attempt to root Android phones. Rather, it was designed to run in the background secretly.

This particular piece of malware was embedded in applications that promised to help users cheat their way through Rovio's popular Angry Birds game (Angry Birds itself was not infected).

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