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HTC Android Phones Found With Malware Pre-Installed

Posted by Soulskill on from the saving-users-time-and-effort dept.

Trailrunner7 writes "Security researchers have found that Vodafone, one of the world's larger wireless providers, is distributing some HTC phones with malware pre-installed on them. The phone, HTC's Magic, runs the Google Android mobile operating system, and is one of the more popular handsets right now. A researcher at Panda Software received one of the handsets recently, and upon attaching it to her PC, found that the phone was pre-loaded with the Mariposa bot client. Mariposa has been in the news of late thanks to some arrests connected to the operation of the botnet."

6 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Technically, not installed... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The software in question was an autorun file, so it wasn't installed on the phone, it was just present on the phone's flash drive waiting to try to infect any OS stupid enough to automatically run programs from untrusted devices. It's not like the phone was running a botnet client and using up your data allowance sending spam, it was just a carrier.

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    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    1. Re:Technically, not installed... by clone53421 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That’s a good distinction to make.

      Of course I immediately assumed they didn’t really mean “installed”, since it’s a Windows virus and an Android OS...

      --
      Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
    2. Re:Technically, not installed... by Manax · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's just ridiculous. Did you even read the summary? This isn't about you installing a trojan on your phone, or about how open the platform is or isn't. It's about it COMING FROM THE CARRIER that way. This could have just as easily happened to an iPhone and had a mac or PC virus on it...

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      "Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
  2. Please by oldhack · · Score: 5, Funny

    Linux is not a malware. Such smear tactic at slashdot must stop.

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    Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
  3. You know Android has hit the big leagues by 0xdeadbeef · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When people are trying to slander it. They're blaming everyone under the sun, when the most likely vector is a store employee who simply plugged the device into a computer and copied the file to the flash drive.

  4. Re:Now THAT's Multitasking! by genghisjahn · · Score: 5, Funny

    Unfortunately, as an iPhone user, if I want to get malware my only option is to get it through the app store.

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    Sorry about the mess.