Vodafone HTC Magic smartphone 'contains malware'

2010-03-10

Malware has been discovered on a Vodafone HTC Magic smartphone while using Google's Android system, it has been confirmed.

Pedro Bustamante, a researcher at Panda Security, revealed that anti-virus software detected an autorun.inf and an autorun.exe as malicious when the phone was hooked up to a PC.

The expert added that further inspection of the malware - which was found to be a Mariposa bot client - revealed that it resides in the phone's memory rather than on the Android's file system.

"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," he wrote in a blog post.

"Once infected you can see the malware 'phoning home' to receive further instructions, probably to steal all of the user's credentials and send them to the malware writer."

Mr Bustamante added that his company is now set to test more of the phones, which also showed signs of the Confiker and Lineage password-stealing malware.

The HTC Magic was first released in Spain on April 27th 2009.

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