Fishy Android apps may have been malware, says researcher: Via Computerworld Security News.

Dubious apps appear, then disappear, from Google's Android Market

Suspicious applications that may have stolen users' online banking credentials have appeared on the Android Market, the Google-run app store for its mobile operating system.

Although the potentially-malicious applications first appeared on Google's online mart in December, news of them went public only today as several outlets and security companies noticed warnings posted by banks and credit unions. Google has since removed the applications from the online market.

One of those financial institutions, BayPort Credit Union of Newport News, Va., posted its alert Dec. 22 about a rogue Android app that promised its members easy access to their online banking. "It is believed that fraudsters deployed fraudulent mobile banking applications to the Android Marketplace, using a phishing technique to attempt to gain access to mobile banking users financial information," said BayPort's warning.

First Tech Credit Union of Portland Ore. -- it also has branches in Salem and Eugene, Ore., as well as in the Seattle, Wash. area -- issued a similar warning the same day. [ Read more ... ]

Browse Anonymously on Your Android Phone With Tor: Via OStatic.

Many people use the open source application Tor on the desktop for anonymous browsing sessions. Thanks to a grant from the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge and the team behind The Guardian Project, now Android mobile phone owners can use Tor to browse privately on their handheld devices, too.

"We have successfully ported the native C Tor app to Android and built an Android application bundle that installs, runs and provides the glue needed to make it useful to end users…. secure, anonymous access to the web via Tor on Android is now a reality," writes Guardian Project team member Nathan Freitas. [ Read more ... ]