Memory Cards of 3,000 Phones Infected By Malware 63
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:iPhone pwnz (Score:5, Informative)
this wasn't software downloaded from the internet for the phone, it appears the card was infected before it was put into the phone. the code wouldn't even execute on the phone, only if you plugged the phone into your computer and mounted the sd card. thus the walled garden wouldn't protect you and is completely unrelated.
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Probably occurred in much the same as it did for Dell. Someone went and used a production computer for personal use.
You would figure that all the computers on the factory floor would be locked down tight.
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Why would an SD card come anywhere near a PC during the manufacturing process? Aren't they fabricated in large batches, not unlike RAM or CPUs? The only part of the process that I would think might involve a PC would be the formating at the end. Yet it seems like they'd have a dedicated hardware device that formats multiple chips at a time.
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The only real question is whether the hardware interface between the commodity PC components and the large number of SD cards is something fairly custom, or basically just a whole lot of USB SD card readers mounted in some sort of frame. A specialized i
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It happened with some iPods several years back. As far as I heard, the iPods were quality-tested using an infected Windows machine in the Chinese factory.
Smart phones? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Smart phones? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Malware and what else... (Score:2)
Honest Question (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably incidental (Score:5, Interesting)
In the one case I'm familiar with, which was at another company, the infection was traced to a single PC on the production floor that was just *packed* with malware. Apparently, it had been re-purposed from somebody's desk to the QA station when production capacity was expanded.
This was at a reputable, top-tier contract manufacturing company.
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Re-purposed and not cleaned beforehand? I thought it was SOP to wipe the drives of any re-purposed machine . . .
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Since most cards are in Fat32, Linux can do it, OSX can do it, BeOS could do it, and my guess is even eComstation can do it.
Why the heck are they using a *Windows* machine to prep the card in the beginning?
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because they don't know any better? (obviously)
Ah-Ha!!! (Score:2, Funny)
I sense the Evil Hand of Steve Jobs behind this!!!!
3,000 sounds like an arbitrary number (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't know how many phones they make a year, but in a phone market that sells hundreds of millions of phones each year, 3,000 is a pretty isolated incident. Even 10,000 isn't that much.
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Perhaps they run them in batches of 3000 and the skid before and the skid after were clean?
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When you take the number of HTC Magic phones that shipped, and subtract the number that were returned, you get 3,000.
OK, that was mean. I've gotta get outside.
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>>>"Democracy is the pathetic belief in the wisdom of collective ignorance." -- H.L. Mencken
Actually studies have found that when you take a mob of people, and have them make guesses, they often come-up with the right answer. For example, ask an audience to guess how many jellybeans are in a jar, average their answers, and you'll have the correct answer +/- 1 jellybean.
BACK TO TOPIC:
What good is an 8 gigabyte RAM card? You can't even run Windows 95 on that?
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"Official system requirements were an Intel 80386 DX CPU of any speed, 4 MB of system RAM, and 120 MB of hard drive space."
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"This configuration was distinctly suboptimal for any productive use..... if any networking or similar components were installed the system would refuse to boot with 4 megabytes of RAM. To achieve optimal performance, Microsoft recommends an Intel 80486 or compatible microprocessor with at least 8 MB of RAM."
Apparently even back then Microsoft was taking the ACTUAL requirements, and dividing them in half, like when they claimed Vista would work on 1/2 gig of RAM when it clearly could not.
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I ran it on a 1.2GB hard drive when it first came out.
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Glad I use Virgin Mobile!
Like Amiga nobody's ever heard of it... not even virus writers.
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nobody's ever heard of it... not even virus writers.
But when they do, it'll be fucked - and that's the end of its Virginity.
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Virgin, Tesco and the other MVNOs are going to fight it out soon. I wouldn't be surprised if Virgin won.
It's a Windows malware, right? (Score:1, Interesting)
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-mod
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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.
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Especially given that there's no good reason for memory cards to come "pre-loaded" with anything at all and the phone's firmware has the ability to format memory cards.
The real question is (Score:3, Funny)
Does Apple have a patent on this already?
Lineage (Score:2, Funny)
No bark... no fruit!
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quality control (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:what s the safest cellphones? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I just want a cellphone that allows, well, you know, to call people.
What would be the simplest, easiest, cellphone with the least functionality (no bluetooth, no Java, no appstore, no memory card) that would fit me?
You know, one with ten numbers and a "call" and a "hang up" button?
You say you want "simplest and easiest". Think deeply about what you're trying to do. Do you actually want to talk to a "number", or do you really intend to talk to a specific person? This is a real question, and not intended to be a smart-assed comment.
Most people assume a simple phone is one that dials numbers, but that's because we've been trained by 80 years of technological limits that have forced us to abstract human conversations behind strings of digits. With new phones that have contact lists,
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there are some very basic phones available intended for old folks. Often they have things like big buttons and big displays too. e.g. http://www.doro.com/global/businessunit/dorocare/Product?c=11900&p=330GSM [doro.com] (that one doesn't do the US bands unfortunately but I'd be very surprised if there weren't similar devices that did)
For the most part though if you still have decent vision I'd suggest just getting a basic nokia and ignoring any features you aren't interested in.
Anti-virus programs not so stupid? (Score:1)
Maybe this is one example of why it might be a good idea to have one available for an occasional scan. Admittedly anyone running a *nix based computer would not have had a problem with this malware.
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``Admittedly anyone running a *nix based computer would not have had a problem with this malware.''
I can't help but wonder "how long?"
How long until we *nix users start having to bog down our systems in order to slow the flood of malware that would otherwise corrupt them?
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``Admittedly anyone running a *nix based computer would not have had a problem with this malware.''
I can't help but wonder "how long?"
How long until we *nix users start having to bog down our systems in order to slow the flood of malware that would otherwise corrupt them?
Given that viruses and other malware have been a fact of life for as long as I've been using PCs (i.e. early '90s), and that they have never been an issue for Mac or Linux, even in the days when Macs were nearly as numerous as PCs, I'm inclined to say that day will never come.
What's more likely is that -just like Unix/Linux did- Windows will ultimately drag itself out of the morass of insecurity in which it's currently mired. Eventually....
... Possibly even in my lifetime. 8^)
No surprise (Score:1)
oh crap (Score:1)
Similiar Experience (Score:3, Informative)
I purchased a digital picture frame made by Insignia in 2008. When Plugged into my PC my AV(Nod32 Eset) found two files it listed as viruses. After removing them, the picture frame worked fine.
About a month later Insignia sent a letter explaining there may have been viruses on the internal memory of the frame.I think this happens quite a bit.