Memory Cards of 3,000 Phones Infected By Malware

itwbennett sends us a few links from IT World tracing a story about infected microSD cards in Vodaphone-supplied mobile phones. "The original report came on March 8 after an employee of Panda Security plugged a newly ordered HTC Magic phone from Vodafone into a Windows computer, where it triggered an alert from the antivirus software. Further inspection of the phone found the device's 8GB microSD memory card was infected with a client for the now-defunct Mariposa botnet, the Conficker worm, and a password stealer for the Lineage game. At that point it was at thought to be an issue with a specific refurbished phone. On Wednesday another phone surfaced with traces of the Mariposa botnet. And now Vodafone is saying that as many as 3,000 HTC Magic phones may be affected."

Re:Smart phones?

[Jeng]

I don't know, but I bet it begins with social networking applications.

Probably the best way to hide a bot-net on a phone.

3,000 sounds like an arbitrary number

[grahamsaa]

How do they know it's not 2,000 or 10,000. Hell, earlier this week it was an "isolated incident."

Re:3,000 sounds like an arbitrary number

[Zerth]

Perhaps they run them in batches of 3000 and the skid before and the skid after were clean?

Re:It's a Windows malware, right?

[OrwellianLurker]

From TFA: With the first phone, the Mariposa botnet code automatically ran and attempted to infect a computer. Mariposa was at one time one of the largest botnets, but security researchers were able to shut it down in December after disabling its command-and-control servers

It's a Windows malware, right? So a "Windows" computer connect to the phones sdcard and attempts to autorun whatever on it. I don't see how the malware can somehow activated and affect Android Linux O/S running on ARM chip inside a user-mode VM. Do botnets have legs now?

It's irrelevant what operating system the malware operates on. The fact that malware came pre-loaded is troubling.

Re:iPhone pwnz

[wprowe]

Since the walled garden (iPhone) doesn't have an SD card slot, we would not be affected. So the walled garden does protect us.

quality control

[jmnormand]

and this is what happens when you buy from the lowest bidder in china.

Re:what s the safest cellphones?

[Tikkun]

You want the Jitterbug [jitterbug.com].

Re:Probably incidental

[Belial6]

No, it SHOULD be SOP. It should be trivial, but I haven't been in a single business where it actually was SOP. I'm not saying that there are not businesses that do it right, but you don't get to look like a hero fixing computer problems if there are no computer problems to fix.