Panda Discovers Malware on HTC Magic Phone
09.03.10
Upon further investigation, Panda found that the employee's phone contained three malware programs: a client for the now-defunct Mariposa botnet, the Conficker worm as well as a password stealer for the Lineage game, said Pedro Bustamante, Panda's senior research adviser.
The malware programs were on the phone's 8GB microSD memory card, which mounts as an external drive when plugged into a PC, Bustamante said. When plugged into a Windows PC, the Mariposa botnet client would automatically run, Bustamante said.
Mariposa was at one time one of the largest botnets responsible for denial-of-service attacks and stealing banking credentials until it was shut down by security researchers in December after they disabled its command-and-control servers. Spanish police have since arrested three men affiliated with the botnet.
Mariposa's autorun configuration may have overwritten Conficker's autorun capability, Bustamante said. Conficker is a worm that still infects millions of machines worldwide despite an aggressive campaign by security experts to eradicate it. The password-stealing program would not run automatically unless someone double clicked on the file, Bustamante said.
Source: PC World