>An employee at Spanish antivirus firm Panda Security received a new Android-based Vodafone HTC Magic with malware on it, according to researchers at Panda Labs.
“Today one of our colleagues received a brand new Vodafone HTC Magic with Google’s Android OS,” researcher Pedro Bustamante wrote on the Panda Research Blog on Monday.
“The interesting thing is that when she plugged the phone to her PC via USB, her Panda Cloud Antivirus went off, detecting both an autorun.inf and autorun.exe as malicious,” he wrote. “A quick look into the phone quickly revealed it was infected and spreading the infection to any and all PCs that the phone would be plugged into.”
The malware began “phoning home” for instructions, Bustamante wrote. It’s likely the user’s credentials would have been stolen, he speculated.
The malware turned out to be related to the Mariposa botnet, but there was other malware on the device too–Conficker and a Lineage password-stealing Trojan, he said.
A Vodafone spokesperson did not return an e-mail from CNET seeking comment, but The Register published a statement from Vodafone that said it is investigating the matter.
“Following extensive quality assurance testing on HTC Magic handsets in several of our operating companies, early indications are that this was an isolated local incident,” the statement said.
Source: CNET
Let’s see how long this remains an “isolated incident”
The imaginary joys of an open mobile platform do not translate into a real world business success.
Google will rue the day it decided to go it alone rather than use the iPhone as it’s primary client.
NOTE: For those who repeatedly try and spread FUD that the reason Macs have no viruses is because there are so few of them, pause to think. There are tens of millions more iPhones than Android phones and yet which was the one to get infected? Security via Obscurity myth busted yet again. Right, now read that again 3 times.
(Jailbroken iPhones HAVE been infected. Why? Because they are no longer secure after being forced to be a more open platform!!)
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