Malware distributed on HTC Magic smartphone
March 10, 2010 by admin
Filed under Mobile Phones
A user of Panda Cloud Antivirus has detected malware being shipped on an HTC Magic Android phone. Clearly, if malware can be distributed by a battery charger or digital picture frame, it can be distributed via a smartphone, which can show up as a disk drive when plugged into a PC.
After plugging the device into a PC with a USB cable, the users’s Panda Cloud Antivirus detected both an autorun.inf and autorun.exe as malicious. The phone was infected with a Mariposa bot which would spread to any PC the Magic was plugged into.
Once infected the malware “phones home” for more instructions. Typically these sorts of bots attempt to the user’s credentials and send them to the malware writer. The obvious root cause is that PC(s) at the manufacturing plant are infected, as with the older issues about digital picture frames.
Interestingly, Panda found two other types of malware on the device. The Vodafone HTC Magic also held Confiker and Lineage, as well. You may recall that Conficker was thought to be the “end of the Internet” by some, but with security firms, Microsoft, and others such as US CERT working together, it wasn’t as bad as expected.
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