We’ve reported on new devices shipping with pre-installed malware before, and this time it’s the Android-based HTC Magic phone.
As reported today on Threat Post, a researcher at Panda Security connected the new phone–from European distributor Vodafone–to her PC and was alerted by her anti-virus software that the handset was infected with the Mariposa botnet client malware, which quickly attempted to infect other PCs in the network.
And perhaps even more shocking, this was not the only malware pre-loaded on the phone:
Interestingly enough, the Mariposa bot is not the only malware I found on the Vodafone HTC Magic phone. There’s also a Confiker and a Lineage password stealing malware. I wonder who’s doing QA at Vodafone and HTC these days…
Tags: botnet, conficker worm, malware, mariposa, mobile-security
This is very misleading posting. The phone was not infected, it was a flash card formatted for windows was infected. That was most likely refurbished phone that came from the user using infected Windows PC.
Reading of this post make someone to believe that Android is responsible for people negledgence.
I can hardly believe that there are many refurbushed Android phones. This type of phone is couple of months old!
It might be possible that infection comes from preformated card but I doubt that this is refurbished phone.
Whole case needs more investigation before final answer…
Zlatko
[...] previously posted about a number of consumer devices shipping from the factory with malware pre-installed. The latest example comes from Olympus Japan and their Stylus Tough 6010 compact digital [...]