Google I/O is approaching swiftly, so that means it’s time to fill up our calendars with evening activities, one of which seems to be Lookout Mobile Security’s party. Last year, they asked us to invite a big group of readers from Droid Life to join in on the fun (“fun” meaning free booze and prizes), and have once again asked that we do the same for another 10 members of the DL community. 

Today, Lookout is reporting that they have found a new family of malware that has been running rampant throughout Google Play called, BadNews. BadNews was found on a total of 32 applications on Google Play and through statistics, is said to have been downloaded roughly 2 million to 9 million times. 

This morning, Lookout Mobile Security published version 3.0 of their mobile Android application on Google Play. The update is pretty massive in terms of looks and functionality, which has Lookout very proud of their work. For starters, it does indeed look a lot cleaner and sophisticated, but what good are looks without awesome features? Don’t worry, they covered that too.

News broke this week that had many Samsung and Android device owners worried over the safety of their data. Apparently, if an at-risk device visited a website containing a line of code, the device’s contents could be wiped and erased completely without the user being able to stop it. Lookout is taking this vulnerability quite seriously and has released an update to their application to protect against these forms of attack. 

Uh oh, you’ve lost your phone and aren’t near a computer to help you locate it. No worries, you have Lookout installed and your friend has a smartphone too. With Lookout’s newly redesigned mobile web application, finding your device at the Starbucks you left it at is now even easier than it was before. 

If you are already going to be in San Francisco for Google I/O at the end of this month, then how would you like to come hang out with the DL crew at Lookout’s I/O party called “Party Your Apps Off”? The party is the night of Tuesday, June 26 at 8PM, and will feature plenty of good food (food truck style), unlimited drinks, Android-centric goodness, and even goodie bags for the first few people that show up at the door. The location is secret for now, but Lookout has assured us that it will be at one of SF’s hottest downtown spots. If you are going to be around, jump past the break for details on how to enter to win 1 of 20 tickets. 

People who download applications and side-load them onto their devices are sometimes at risk, whether we want to believe it or not. Whether it’s from an alternative market such as Amazon’s Appstore or Getjar, it is best to take a safe approach when installing all applications. To help save you the stress, Lookout Mobile Security has introduced Install Monitoring and File System Monitoring. What these actions do is monitor files within the apks before you even install them, assuring there is never any malicious programs loaded onto your device. 

Worldwide security giant Lookout, has published the first ever lost phone survey. By analyzing the data from over 15 million of their users, Lookout has realized that people spend nearly $30 billion on lost devices each year. Keep it in your pocket, folks! Along with publishing all of this data, Lookout has created the Mobile Lost & Found website, which interactively shows people where phones are being lost and helps you get a sense of just how expensive it is to lose your smartdevice.