Google disables Android malware [Financial Times]
If you're an Android phone owner and you downloaded an app called Steamy Window, you may have noticed that the app disappeared from your phone recently. Last week, Google decided to use its app "kill switch" to remove around 50 apps directly from users' phones because the apps contained malicious code. The malicious apps were available for download from Google's Android Market and were subsequently downloaded and installed by around 250,000 users.
The malicious apps included some that roped a user's phone into a botnet, allowing the app's developers to control that user's phone with a command from a control server.
Google's open source approach to Android, which includes allowing developers to upload apps to the Android Market without a testing or approval process, lets these problematic apps make their way onto users' phones. In response, Google decided to use its ability to reach into the phones in users' pockets to remove the applications for the first time.
There are many obvious advantages to the open source approach. Just this week, sales numbers indicated that Google's Android passed RIM's BlackBerry OS to become the most popular smartphone OS, based largely on phone manufacturers' ability to use Android off the shelf without a licensing royalty. But unlike Apple's and RIM's walled-garden iOS, which requires developers to submit code for testing and approval, Android is far more vulnerable to incidents like these.
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