Panda Security reported on 8th March that a brand new HTC Magic phone purchased at Vodafone online shop and sent by them came infected with a Malware out of the box(Brand-New).Amongst the malicious application on the Android-based phone were a Botnet client named as Mariposa and the infamous Conficker worm.
According to Panda Security “Today one of our colleagues received a brand new Vodafone HTC Magic with Google’s Android OS. “Neat” she said. Vodafone distributes this phone to its userbase in some European countries and it seems affordable as you can get it for 0€ or 1€ under certain conditions.
The interesting thing is that when she plugged the phone to her PC via USB her Panda Cloud Antivirus went off, detecting both an autorun.inf and autorun.exe as malicious. 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.”
In response to the Panda Security report, Vodafone launched an investigation into the incident. “Following extensive Quality Assurance testing on HTC Magic handsets in several of our operating companies, early indications are that this was an isolated local incident. Vodafone keeps its security processes under constant review as new threats arise, and we will take all appropriate actions to safeguard our customers’ privacy,” the company said in a statement.