On Friday, Lookout Security spotted four apps on the Android Market that were infected with a variant of the "DroidDream Light" malware which has now plagued the e-store three times this year.

And today, researchers at North Carolina State University announced they had found new malware that forced Android smartphones into texting a premium number.

Lookout's find was the third instance of DroidDream-infected applications making it into Google's e-store, following an original run in March and a . Those two campaigns forced Google to pull over 80 poisoned apps from its store.

According to Lookout, Google quickly yanked the four new applications from the Android Market.

"Fortunately the malware was available in the Android Market for a short period of time so the number of downloads was limited to 1,000-5,000," Lookout reported in an posted to its blog.