Early last week, we saw 21 malware-filled apps invade the Android Market and get installed on tens of thousands of devices. Today, Google addressed the situation on their blog and outlined what they plan to do to prevent it from happening again. The Big G says that they removed the offending apps from the Market within minutes of being notified, suspended the dev, and are zapping the software from users' devices. There's also going to be a security update rolled out to the affected devices to kill the exploit and prevent it from accessing any more user data. Finally, Google said that it'll be adding new measures to prevent malicious apps from entering the Market in the future and that it'll be working with partners to "provide the fix for the underlying security issues."

It's kind of surprising that it's taken Google almost a week to publicly discuss what happened, but good on them for being so straightforward about what they did/are doing to correct the situation. Hopefully El Goog can work to make sure that the fix they mentioned gets rolled out to all handsets quickly, because we've seen in the past that sometimes it can take some time for carriers to get an update pushed to its handsets.

Via PhoneScoop, Google